Josh Widdicombe - Watching Neighbours Twice a Day...: How 90s TV (Almost) Prepared Me For Life: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

First published in the UK by Blink Publishing

an imprint of Bonnier Books UK

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Hardback 9781788704359

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Copyright Josh Widdicombe, 2021

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To Pearl and Cassius,

I hope your childhoods contain something as life affirming as Neighbours

And to Rose,

who would have thought this at the start of series 3?

To inform, educate and entertain

Lord Reith, Director-General of the BBC, 192738, summarising the purpose of the Corporation

Television, the drug of the nation,

Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation

Television, the Drug of the Nation by The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, 1992

Number 3 ... Its a girl who can cry milk!

Chris Evans, TFI Friday, 1997

Id like to start this book by discussing the puppet and rabbit Gus Honeybun. I am fairly confident this is the first book in the history of literature to do such a thing, although I must admit I havent read any Charlotte Bront.

Until I left home to go to university at the age of 18, I assumed Gus Honeybun was a big deal. Not mega-famous if Id been asked for a list of 90s icons I wouldnt have plumped for Gascoigne, Blair and Honeybun but a household name, like Des Lynam or Maureen from Driving School. Sadly, as I found out when throwing out a few Honeybun-based jokes to unimpressed girls in freshers week, his fame actually stopped just north of Yeovil.

For those not raised in Cullompton or Great Torrington I should briefly explain the tale of Gus Honeybun. Augustus Jeremiah Honeybun (to give him his full name) was a shoddily made rabbit puppet who co-hosted Gus Honeybuns Magic Birthdays on Television South West (local ITV in the West Country). Gus Honeybuns Magic Birthdays would last ten minutes and consisted entirely of the host reading out childrens birthday cards with Honeybun matching their age in years with the amount of times he would bunny-hop up and down. Naturally.

If the birthdays and bouncing up and down werent enough for you, behind Honeybun and his human sidekick and, to be clear, as with all great puppets, the human was the sidekick a green screen would show different drawings of generic countryside scenes. Maybe a stile going over a fence in a field or a church in the snow, the kind of things you would get on a disappointing 1,000-piece jigsaw given to you by an auntie at Christmas. Most suspiciously, Honeybun would switch between these backgrounds by occasionally pressing a magic mushroom-shaped button, which even at the age of seven I felt was a little on the nose when it came to drug references.

I want to be clear on this. At the time this show felt to me like a totally normal thing to be screened on television. In fact, it was by a distance the most popular thing Television South West (TSW) produced.show genre stretched out to the rest of the country I cant see why it would have but it had taken Devon and Cornwall by storm. Gus Honeybuns Magic Birthdays was a West Country institution, like clotted cream or pasties but with none of the later-life heart implications.

It says a lot for the pull of Honeybun that each day viewers were tuning in in their droves to essentially find out about the birthday of a seven-year-old girl in Plympton who they had never met. And it wasnt just childrens birthdays. It was rumoured that adults would also write in to get their names read out, just listing their birthdays as much younger than they were. Of course this was a more innocent time when grown adults pretending to be young children were greeted with less suspicion.

It must have been charisma that Honeybun had because he wasnt popular for being beautifully made and brilliantly operated. While Edd the Duck or Gordon the Gopher could express emotion and move easily to interact with their human friend, Gus looked like someone had stuck some grey fur on the pedal bin. He appeared to be a combination of cheap and heavy, like a puppet created to entertain children in an industrial corner of the Soviet Union. His movement comprised his head turning side to side like Linda Blair in The Exorcist or his ears flapping up and down like he had ticks. His trademark bunny hops were literally just the puppeteer moving him up and down while his much sought-after winks involved him moving his eyelid down and up with the elegance of a window blind that you hadnt quite got the knack of.

If Im honest I hadnt thought about Gus Honeybun in years but then during the writing of this book a friend sent me a link to a huge piece of breaking news. It had come to light that beyond wishing people happy birthday and struggling to wink, Gus Honeybun had another role. One of his sidekicks, Ian Stirling (not that one), had been using Gus to send secret messages to the South Wests LGBTQ+ community, announcing where parties were going to be through birthday cards containing code words such as Auntie Stella. While I remembered Gus as just a charmingly crap puppet that I absent-mindedly sat through before Home and Away, it turned out he was a rabbit with hidden depths. Suddenly I found myself going down a Gus Honeybun rabbit hole (pun intended), watching old clips and reading on dedicated Honeybun fan sites about how he was a far bigger deal in the South West than I had ever realised.

It turned out that by the time I stumbled across Gus in the early 90s, he had already lived a life. He had arrived on TV in the South West in 1961, with the then holders of the ITV regional contract Westward TV claiming they had found him under a gorse bush, something which I assume was meant to sound sweet and quaint, but in reality made him sound like an old porn mag.

Despite this inauspicious origin story, Gus swiftly became more popular than Westwards human presenters and remained on screen for 20 years. By the time TSW took over local broadcasting in the 80s, Guss stardom had reached new heights. He released his own single, had various merch and for some reason had his own branded bus covered in pictures of carrots that ran people around the Torbay area. His myth still lives on. I have just typed his name into eBay and found that a Gus Honeybun pencil sharpener from back in the day will set you back 75. Ive clicked Watch Item but Im yet to make a firm bid.