Yes, it a difficult one. I can’t remember the flippin’ bloke’s name now, but he used to demonstrate all the car cleaning products. Big tall bloke. Overtly heterosexual in manner as opposed to the vaguely camp persona I felt Howard demonstrated on air. I do recall, they were both standing by a Christmas tree in the studio, and the big tall bloke said words to the effect to Howard that ‘he should be the fairy on top of it’. Now in 1975, that probably would’ve been laughed off as funny by the intended recipient/victim of the gag. But we are used to that kind of thing not happening now, and clearly Howard was upset by it. I think his reply was along the lines of you are not allowed to say things like that these days. They carried on rather uneasily with the rest of the presentation after that.
I have to say I was surprised when they dug up that old clip of him on Blind Date from the early ‘90s, featuring Howard going out with a girl whom he was reunited with years later as part of the story. That said, I couldn’t care less generally, what anybody’s sexuality is nowadays. And plenty of people who present gay or straight on TV, aren’t necessarily gay or straight off-screen anyway. The main issue over I thought was more important over the Howard Ideal World thing, was the guy speaking completely inappropriately to him, and not Howard’s sexuality – gay or straight. Where I did care in the past was when politicians, for example, presented as heterosexual family men, and were then later found out to living a completely different life, at odds with their public and electorate friendly image. To me that is grand hypocrisy and was wrong.
. They varied it each week but always the same theme.
