Meeting your heroes is never a good idea.

I've blogged here about never meeting my ultimate hero; Jacques Cousteau perhaps that is why he has, for me, retained much of the mystique that is central to hero worship.

I have however been lucky enough to meet a few of my heroes and in some cases unfortunate enough to meet others.

By the time I got to meet David Bellamy (above) he had largely discredited himself as a scientist and had become the character he created. As we chatted over dinner the remaining vestiges of respect evaporated in a cloud of pompous nonsense.     

My mild obsession with David Bellamy OBE was instigated by my father, mostly as he was desperate to replace Jacques Cousteau in the hope that I would stop talking in a silly French accent. Given my penchant for imitating my heroes this was probably not as clever a move as he thought it was. I can still do a pretty good Bellamy impression.

When I was a kid Bellamy was pretty big, a serious botanist loads of publications and a string of successful television programmes behind him. He'd even done a superb underwater series looking at the native flora and fauna of the British Isles. I think it was this series that my father thought could be used to wean me off Cousteau.

My adulation for Bellamy took a bit of a tarnishing after he went and did this.



I'm all for promoting science education amongst kids and was a science teacher myself for a number of years but there's just no call for this sort of thing. David Bellamy had quickly become a caricature of himself and increasingly he became the bumbling, air groping, hairball character he created. I still think that his impression of Bellamy was the best and funniest thing that Lenny Henry ever did and quite possibly the only funny thing he did.

My positive childhood memories of David Bellamy probably have lingered on in my subconscious; what other explanation could there possibly be for the picture underneath!!!

lets never speak of this again!

Having fallen out of fashion Bellamy disappeared off our television screens years hence although in recent times has sought and gained notoriety as the, in my opinion badly chosen, face of the climate change sceptics, touting pseudo-science and fraudulent claims to anyone who'll listen. These days he's known for his bad hair, bad singing and bad science.



Now people who know me well, and those of you who have seen the picture of me above, will realise that I, more than most, need to be able to forgive bad hair and bad singing, which I think I can do but forgive bad science; Never, never, never.