Profile: Freddie Starr, comedian, singer and impressionist

I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! has become a home for the dysfunctional and the desperate, and nobody satisfies those criteria better than the washed-up stand-up comedian and light entertainment TV star.

It’s difficult to know where to start with Starr, apart from to commiserate with those poor damned souls who will be marooned on a desert island with one of the least likeable of all comics. A misogynistic, self-obsessed, self-pitying, nihilistic fame junkie whose time has come and gone, the 68-year-old possesses all of the necessary attributes to make an impact in the jungle.

It’s a reflection of his chaotic lifestyle that the overweight Starr may not even be in the jungle this evening, when the new series opens, having been delayed by “insurance problems” due to his ailing health. But once he does enter camp, expect verbal fireworks that may not endear him to his fellow contestants.

Once the most highly paid act on television, Starr has been trying to get back on the box since he was consigned to the wilderness in the late 90s, and he has revelled in his appointed role as a hyperactive agent provocateur for the reality TV show. As he said: “I’m not going to lie, I’m doing this to raise my profile”. That role should be a breeze for this tiresome redneck wildman. “I’ve actually got worse!” he laughs. Actually, Starr is not being completely candid as he has changed. The once svelte impersonator of Adolf Hitler and Elvis these days cuts an unrecognisably rotund figure. The last time he was prepared to discuss his weight was 15 years ago when the self-confessed “fat bastard” had a 42in waist and a 21in neck (“even Mike Tyson only has a 19in neck”), and a lot of pies have disappeared down his alimentary canal since then. Four knee operations, a heart attack and quadruple heart bypass surgery last year, followed by a six-month recuperation, have taken the edge off his chubbiness, but he’s hardly the Scouse stick insect of old.

Yet his appearance is the least of the issues that will face contestants such as veteran US actress Stefanie Powers, Scottish jockey Willie Carson and Emmerdale regular Lorraine Chase. Of much more concern will be his inability to control his temper and a sociopathic personality so severe that none of his three ex-wives, his brother or five children can be guaranteed to take his calls. His ex-agent, Max Clifford says that “the only person Freddie Starr has ever loved or cared for is Freddie Starr – Freddie was a nightmare because he had no discipline. He got to the stage, as so many do, where he thought the world revolved around him. He got to be a monster.”

At the beginning of his career, Starr’s outrageous mimicry, zany sense of humour and lovably anarchic streak saw him feted as a comic genius. He had, he says, “this devilment in me all the time – I asked it to go away, but it wouldn’t.” The result was electric live performances which saw him enter the mainstream with a stellar performance on Opportunity Knocks. He was then seared into the national consciousness with his Royal Variety Performance in 1970 when he became the first act for 47 years to get an encore.

For a while in the 70s and 80s he bestrode mainstream television light entertainment alongside a cadre of profane working-class comics such as Frank Carson, Benny Hill, Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson, falling by the wayside in the late 90s as the new brand of less traditional, more cerebral humour pioneered by Not The Nine O’Clock News and The Young Ones finally changed the parameters of television comedy.

Starr was nevertheless a workaholic who boasted that he did two shows, seven days a week for 30 years. Yet he behaved recklessly when he had money and fame, blowing his cash on flash houses, Rolls-Royces and racehorses, and spending little time with his children or wives, who responded in kind by cleaning him out every time his marriage broke down.

Although he is not a boozer, a nasty little addiction to valium didn’t help his ability to connect with his nearest and dearest, and nor did his childhood experiences. Starr’s father, a bricklayer and part-time bare-knuckle boxer, would get drunk and often beat him so badly that Starr says he once broke both his legs. What’s not in doubt is that, aged six, Starr simply stopped speaking and was put in a children’s home for two years.

His father’s violent, frenetic energy transferred itself to the comic, who punched estranged 21-year-old son Josh in the face and whose second wife Sandy was so scared of him that she slept with a knife under her pillow (not that it helped; he broke her arm). Starr also beat up a Sun reporter who found him living in a mobile home. As his career has stalled, Starr has cut an increasingly pathetic figure. His few television appearances have been embarrassing, such as Celebrity Fit Club in 2004 when he was stripped of the captaincy and shunned by teammates. Celebrity Wife Swap in 2008 was even worse, as Starr and wife Donna took part with Samantha Fox and her lesbian partner Myra Stratton, with Starr demanding that Fox do all the domestic chores and generally coming across as an unpleasant misogynistic throwback.

With few friends left and his career going down the toilet, the ailing Starr has recently alternated between hiding in Spain, touring low-rent men’s clubs and spending time with his psychiatrist. It hasn’t been a gleaming end to a career characterised by self-destructive episodes, such as when he threw maggots over appalled impressionist Faith Brown and guests the last time he hosted a mainstream television show.

But then that sort of extreme behaviour is exactly why he has been chosen to appear on I’m A Celebrity. Worse still, he knows it and is sufficiently desperate to play up to it. Self-loathing, the disdain of others and an audience baying for blood is a toxic mix, and at the root of it all is the dismal figure who once said that “when I look back on my life I think that if I had served 31 years in Dartmoor Prison, I would have been happier. What a waste; what a sad existence.”

Facts of Life

• The “Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster” headline from 1986 was a Max Clifford publicity stunt and never happened. Starr has been a vegetarian since childhood.

• As a child growing up in Liverpool, Starr wanted to become a Grand National-winning jockey but has had to console himself with being a winning owner in 1994 when his horse Minnehoma won the world’s most famous National Hunt race.

• At 14, Starr landed a part in the Liverpool film Violent Playground with David McCallum and Stanley Baxter. In 1997 he got his first role as a serious actor, playing a drugs baron called Izzard in Lynda La Plante’s television movie Supply & Demand.

• Starr’s band Howie Casey and The Seniors played the Cavern and toured Hamburg with the Beatles, with Starr even staying with them for a time in Germany when he fronted a band put together by Brian Epstein and called The Midniters.