Utterly Brilliant?

Chris Hallam celebrates the life and career of a children's TV favourite

- By Chris Hallam

If you watched any children's TV during the school holidays between 1985 and 1992, you would have quickly become familiar with the career of Timmy Mallett, the host of TV-am's Wacaday. Essentially a world of fun, chaos and jokes with the ever enthusiastic and energetic Timmy at its core, Wacaday made a reasonable stab at resurrecting the anarchic spirit of ATV's legendary Saturday morning show Tiswas a full decade on.

Unlike Tiswas, however, Wacaday was often very much a one-man band with Timmy, often clad in a garish tropical shirt and always sporting one of his many pairs of multicoloured glasses, keeping things going himself with no studio audience or even a studio of his own (Wacaday shared its workspace with the grownup TV-am). Children could expect plenty of fun from Timmy himself as he interacted with Wacaday's resident pet cockatiel, Magic (today, Magic is buried in Timmy's garden). Later, there would be cartoons, perhaps Transformers, Batman or Galaxy High. The highlight was always the show's most famous item, Mallett's Mallet. Essentially a competitive game of word association, losers would be "punished" by being "bonked" on the head by a yellow-and-pink sponge mallet wielded by Timmy himself. As Timmy would say himself: "Utterly brilliant."