The ADD-afflicted lord of Saturday morning TV in the Eighties.
Combining lame-duck catchphrases like ‘brilliant’ and ‘blaaah’ with bank manager looks and Tom Selleck shirts paid off big-time for Radio DJ-turned-telly star Mallett, as his Wide Awake Club blazed a trail on ITV from 1984 to 1989. For a time he couldn’t put a foot wrong, until his audience reached puberty and wanted to watch Eurotrash instead. These days he does the rounds of student unions, no doubt interspersing his material with heckler-battling and lurid profanity.
Meeting milk-stealing history blackspot Margaret Thatcher in 1990, he ceremoniously bonked her on the head with his trademark mallet, and sadly not with a real one. He also appeared at the Belfast Buzz in 1989 and a starry-eyed AU chased him through C&A as he tried to escape children just like us.
As a suspiciously Jonathan King-looking man with a hammer and a squeaky voice who would never get on the telly these days, Mallett reminds us of simpler, more innocent times.
