Television presenter

Born: January 17 1957;

Died: December 11 2017

KEITH Chegwin, who has died aged 60, spent more than half a century as a performer, with a career which ranged from an early appearance in Roman Polanski’s film adaptation of Macbeth to a distinctly bathetic stint as the host of all all-nudist game show on Channel 5; he was, however, unquestionably best-known as one of the most successful and prominent presenters of children’s television of the 1970s and 1980s.

He came to widespread attention as one of the main hosts of BBC One’s MultiColoured Swap Shop, a live show which filled most of the Saturday morning schedule from 1976 until 1982. Presented by Noel Edmonds, and also featuring Maggie Philbin (who became Chegwin’s first wife), the show had a magazine format, mixing games, cartoons, interviews with pop stars and sketches. Its unique proposition was the ability for young viewers to ring in and exchange unwanted toys and gifts – swapping, for example, a bicycle for a Scalextric track.

Cheggers, as he was quickly known to the viewers, had a hyperactive approach to presenting, and was usually deputed to outside broadcast duties, setting up Swap Shop roadshows around the country where children could tip up and feature on the programme themselves.

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He was sufficiently popular to be given the reins of his own show in addition to these slots. Cheggers Plays Pop was a game show based in Manchester which featured school teams competing in a series of quizzes and obstacle races; it usually featured a variant of musical chairs on spots painted on the floor and ball games on a bouncy castle – on to which Chegwin would launch himself as the final credits rolled. It ran from 1978 until 1986.

In the 1980s, he and Philbin returned in the follow-up to Swap Shop, which had ended when Edmonds launched his Late Late Breakfast Show in the Saturday early evening slot. Saturday Superstore, in which the Radio 1 DJ Mike Read took over Edmonds’ duties, was otherwise pretty well indistinguishable from its predecessor, and ran for five series between 1982 and 1987.

Keith Chegwin was born, one of twins, on January 17 1957, at Walton in Liverpool. After taking part in an end of the pier talent show in north Wales, he and his brother Jeff joined a concert party which performed at clubs around the north-west of England. (Their older sister Janice was also to make a career in showbusiness, as the radio DJ Janice Long.)

Keith was spotted by June Collins, whose son Phil, later a hugely successful pop star both with the band Genesis and in his solo career, was already a successful child actor, appearing in West End musicals and on television shows such as Junior Showtime.

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At stage school, he and Jeff appeared in a number of stage productions and in Children’s Film Foundation pictures, as well as TV shows and advertisements. In 1971, he played Banquo’s son Fleance in Polanski’s Macbeth, but it was to be his only outing in a significant feature film – he had a very small role in the Peter Sellers film The Optimists of Nine Elms (1973), a piece of music hall slush.

During the early 1970s, Chegwin had a few television parts: he was in the pilot for the Ronnie Barker comedy Open All Hours, and had bit parts in episodes of The Adventures of Black Beauty and Z-Cars as well as a few children’s programmes, notably in The Tomorrow People (1975). But he drifted from acting into presenting and advertising work.

During his stint of Swap Shop he ventured into the pop charts with his co-presenters

as “Brown Sauce”, with the novelty record I Want to Be a Winner. But during the late 80s and 1990s his career took a downturn and, by his own account, he became an alcoholic. His marriage broke down, but his fortunes improved when he quit drinking and, in the mid-1990s, joined the presenting team on The Big Breakfast, Channel Four’s very successful re-invention of morning television, on which he again handled outside broadcast duties.

His subsequent presenting gigs were a mixed bag; in 1999 and 2000 he hosted a two-series revival of the 1970s game show It’s a Knockout for Channel 5; for the same station he presented a one-off programme called Naked Jungle, a quiz in which both he and the contestants were nude (though Chegwin wore a hat). He later described it as “the worst career move” of his life.

He had a stint with GMTV, ITV’s morning show, for several years, and made various attempts to embrace new media. A web-based television programme attracted few followers, but his foray on to Twitter attracted attention for all the wrong reasons, when he made a habit of issuing one-liners and other jokey tweets almost all of which – as other users were quick to point out – seemed to have been cut and pasted from other Twitter accounts.

Chegwin appeared in self-denigrating cameos in Ricky Gervais’s comedy series Extras and Life’s Too Short, and on celebrity editions of quiz shows such as The Chase and Pointless. He was in Dancing on Ice in 2013 (he had been due to be a contestant in an earlier series, but broke several bones on his first rehearsal). He came fourth in the 15th series of Celebrity Big Brother and, also in 2015, appeared on Celebrity Masterchef.

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Keith Chegwin had a daughter, Rose, by his first marriage and a son, Ted, by his second wife, Maria, whom he married in 2000. He had recently been struggling with lung disease, but managed to attend his sister Janice’s wedding two months ago with the aid of an oxygen cylinder. He is survived by his second wife and his children.

ANDREW MCKIE