Paul Chuckle brands BBC tribute to Barry a “slap in the face”
The children's TV star said Chucklevision should have been aired on mainstream TV in the wake of his brother's death
Chucklevision star Paul Elliott – best known by his stage name Paul Chuckle – has hit out at the BBC for not airing the show on mainstream TV after his brother Barry died last August.
The BBC made available the final series of the slapstick CBBC show on BBC iPlayer in the wake of Barry's death, aged 73, so that “viewers old and new can enjoy Barry and Paul’s unique brand of kids’ comedy”.
But Paul said a more fitting tribute would have been to air the series on BBC TV. “That again was a slap in the face,” he told RadioTimes.com. “They could have at least put it on the BBC – not iPlayer.
“They asked permission and I said ‘why not on main TV?’”
Chucklevision, which documented Chuckle Brothers Paul and Barry’s comedy antics as they haplessly carried out a variety of jobs and tasks, ran for 21 series spanning two decades from 1987 to 2009.
Paul was speaking in celebration of the show topping a RadioTimes.com poll of the greatest CBBC series of all time. Over 3,000 people voted the series number one after CBBC branded it “Mid-Tier” in a ranking of its own shows last week.
“It was absolutely ridiculous what they put. People were saying how stupid this is,” Paul said. “It doesn’t really mean anything it’s just another slap in the face from CBBC. When they dropped [the show] they didn’t tell us. We eventually rang them and said ‘we’ve not done a script meeting’ and they said ‘we’ve decided we’re not going to do one’ and that was it. They just dropped it.
“The excuse was that the repeats were getting as many views as the new ones, and then a year later they dropped that. It was a total lack of respect.”
Paul has continued to do PA appearances at clubs in the wake of Barry’s death, but said he misses the pair’s comedy routines on-stage.
“It’s different. I don’t do stand-up or comedy I just do a DJ set and then say hello to everybody,” he said. “I like clubbing, I always have. It really wasn’t Barry’s thing – he was teetotal. I’m the complete opposite. I’m fall-over-total.
“I think, ‘we’re never going to be on stage having a laugh’. We used to make each other laugh all the time on stage.”
