The Cloggies (A 'Private Eye' book)

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Known as the PEOPLE’S PAPER, Euro Weekly News is the leading English language newspaper in Spain. And it’s FREE! The strip served as a satire of northern English male culture and focused on a team of men who took part in what the group called Lancashire clog-dancing. This version of clog-dancing involved two teams dancing towards each other in formation, followed by each attempting to cripple their opponents with gracefully executed knee and foot moves. The Daily Mail and the Guardian allong with many other papers covered his passing . Unfortunately The Times and the Telegraph stated incorrectly that Bill's late wife Rosa Tidy was still alive. She passed away on the 24th November 2019. Tidy's many TV appearances have included Countdown, Watercolour Challenge, Through the Keyhole, Blankety Blank and Countryfile. His radio appearances included an accomplished performance on a 1989 edition of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, when he stood in for Barry Cryer and a 1991 Series where he stood in for Tim Brooke-Taylor. He wrote and presented Draw Me, a children's television series in 13 parts. He was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1975 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews. [ citation needed]

Composer Tim Rice said: ‘Bill will be missed not only for his great talent but for his warmth, wit and wisdom.’ I should have said “No, mum! This is a major turning point in my young life. I must get my pencil and-” but my mum could handle drunken sailors three at a time so I put my career on hold till the end of the war and waited for the next one. Korea. For more than 40 years, Kegbuster proclaimed the joys of “Crudgies”, the cask ale from Crudgington’s brewery. The name was based not on the revered Manchester beer Boddingtons or “Boddies” for short but the name of a player at Crewe Alexandra football club.

“Is there Any News of the Iceberg?”

In the May Blitz in 1940 we would retire to the cellar with our cousins, the Hughes family, who shared the house with us. It was there we founded the ‘Juanita Club’. Juanita was a cheap red wine which I discovered at the age of seven to have an excellent nose and delicious hints of strawberries and fish and chips. It saw us through the air raids and I was only scared once. The dancers had a legendary capacity for beer and would repair to the nearest tavern for a gallon or two following every epic contest. Bill also enjoyed beer in moderation and in the 1970s he accepted an offer from the fledgling Campaign for Real Ale ( Camra) to draw a monthly strip called Kegbuster for its newspaper What’s Brewing. For more than 40 years Bill regaled Camra members with the battles between the ale-loving Kegbuster and such giant brewers as Grotnys and Twitbread that attempted to replace cask beer with keg. Bill sporting a PCO badge with former PCO ‘Chairleg’ Bill Stott, Photo by Rob Doyle kindly supplied by Chris Williams. The Cloggies were undisputed champions of their ‘sport’, usually inflicting grave injuries before repairing to the nearest pub. Their capacity for beer was legendary; their home venue, the Clog & Bells, Blagdon, where Doris the barmaid was always in a welcoming mood. There were also unorthodox activities involving the use of ferrets. Expose of chess-players’ manners tells you everything you wanted to know about the game but were afraid to ask – and perhaps a few things more.

Strips from The Cloggies, along with several of Tidy's other works, were displayed at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool during 1986. [15] Other works [ edit ] Victor, Terry; Dalzell, Tom (2007-12-01). The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Routledge. p.1979. ISBN 978-1-134-61533-9.The series lampooned current sports culture and introduced an entire sub-culture of dance leagues, a governing body for the sport (characterised as officious, clumsy, bureaucratic, out-of-touch and based on the Football Association), an idiosyncratic cast of sociopaths and a yearning for earlier, gentler days of greater respect (such as the famous Policeman on a White Bicycle). As a reflection of the officious nature of league officials and umpires (who always had it in for the lads) the scoring system was deeply arcane and complex, with final scores such as 124.863 to 92 ​ 14⁄ 37 being recorded. Tributes also poured in from famous faces including Harry Potter star Miriam Margolyes who simply said that Mr Tidy was a ‘very special man’ who ‘will never die’.

Bill had a phenomenal work load at the time. “I was doing six strips and had to be careful I didn’t send the wrong one to a newspaper or magazine,” he said. The Fosdyke Saga, the Cloggies and Kegbuster all appeared in book form and Fosdyke also became a radio serial.The Cloggies appeared in Private Eye from 1967 to 1981. It was an affectionate send-up of the radio soap The Archers, billed as “an everyday story of country folk” whereas the Cloggies were “an everyday story of clog-dancing folk”. The strip followed the misadventures of a team of clog dancers who took on rival teams and developed such tactical foot manoeuvres as the Triple Arkwright. The dancers had a legendary capacity for beer and would repair to the nearest pub for a gallon or two after every epic contest.

Neville Grundy said: “Bill Tidy was a neighbour in the early 1980s when our family lived in Birkdale. He used to enjoy a pint in the long-gone Berkeley on Queens Road where I occasionally saw him. He was generous with his time. At one CAMRA fund-raising event, he leapt around the room unveiling, sequence by sequence, an enormous strip illustrating the history of beer from Ancient Egypt to the present day. It must have taken him weeks to prepare and draw and all free of charge and for the cause.

Broadcasts

The stage play. The time is 1902 and the Fosdyke tripe business is failing, so they decide to move to greener pastures in Manchester – the land of meat pies and perhaps fortune? We follow their progress through to the First World War. OTHER WORKS The then 88-year-old was taken to the Midlands hospital in an ambulance for a serious chest infection but had to wait in the vehicle before being admitted.