Where would we be without YouTube? Almost every piece of music I have ever heard is on there, clips of just about every movie and TV show ever made, recipes, live webcams from all over the world and Michael Barrymore. What, Michael Barrymore the TV entertainer whose career was destroyed after a man called Stuart Lubbock was found dead in his swimming pool, full of drugs and alcohol and with injuries that indicated sexual assault? That’s the one. Before then he had hosted shows like Strike It Lucky, which mainly involved him running around like Basil Fawlty and saying “Awight!” It really was as funny as it reads. He seemed to disappear from the public view after the scandal, but in the weirdest YouTube channel ever, he’s back.
I was using YouTube to find out a bit more about a place we are visiting in Cornwall in the coming months and for some reason I was drawn to a video by Barrymore, called Barrymore. I thought it might be a one-off, but it isn’t. The idea is that Barrymore, who now lives in the Kingsbridge and Salcombe area in Devon, visits various places in the south-west and makes videos of it.
Now that’s fair enough. Loads of people make travel videos on YouTube and have their own channels. They are usually terrible, if I am honest, and Barrymore’s is no exception to that rule. Each show goes a bit like this.
Barrymore parks his car and walks into town. He talks to everyone as he walks along and visits every shop, every cafe, every pub en route. And the clear purpose of the whole thing is people recognising him. You know, “Are you Michael Barrymore?” He then asks the person’s name, forgets it, asks again, poses for a selfie and then moves along until he finds someone else to say hello to. And that really is it. He’s not like Michael Portillo on his railway journeys where he engages with people and is genuinely interested in them. This wazzock just wants to be recognised. And it’s very sad to watch.
He’s 73 and looks it. There’s no route back into mainstream television for him, yet he still craves the fame of his younger days. And it is interesting that people recognise him. We are never shown the ones who don’t.
Older folk remember Strike It Lucky but younger folk know who he is through tik-tok, where he has become a medium-sized presence. God knows what young people think of this bloke. I’d be wondering what it was that he did that made him famous because there are precious few clues of it when he was walking about the seaside towns.
Just to make sure I was actually seeing what I thought I was seeing, I watched another episode and it was exactly the same as the first one I saw. I had to check I wasn’t watching the same episode on a loop. Here he was, again, walking round, trying to be recognised.
I must say, if I came across him in a seaside town, the first thing I’d ask him was what happened to Stuart Lubbock. I’ll wager that wouldn’t end up on YouTube.
I do not recommend you spend much time looking for these videos. If you have some grass to watch growing, or paint to watch drying, they will be better options. This is one of the maddest, saddest things I have ever seen. This is a bloke who thinks, and rather wishes, it was still the 1980s and how his modest levels of talent made him a rich man. The saddest thing about Michael Barrymore is that he isn’t funny and never was. And it appears he is the only one who can’t see it.
