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 ] Bill was a firm family man. Bill married his wife Rosa in 1960, and they had two children, Sylvia and Robert. Sadly, Rosa died in 2019, shortly after he had a stroke. 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. Eventually it dawned on me that for most of us, once we are out of our comfort zone, according to the law of averages, we are talking rubbish half of the time anyway! In other words, accept praise and criticism with the same reserve! I’ve had plenty of each.

His workload was phenomenal. At one time he was drawing six strips and he said he had to be careful not to mix them up and send them to the wrong newspapers or magazines. He also appeared regularly on television, in Countdown, Blankety Blank and Countryfile. In 1975 he was confronted by Eamonn Andrews with his famous red book when Bill was the subject of This Is Your Life. Bill was also very humble and he became embarrassed when people complimented him. However he would have been secretly absolutely over the moon with the flattering comments offered by so many. Piers Morgan, Tim Rice, Miriam Margoyles, Monty Don were just some of the folk who said lovely things about Bill. Composer Tim Rice said: ‘Bill will be missed not only for his great talent but for his warmth, wit and wisdom.’

More episodes

In 1983 Granada Television began televising Brass, a comedy drama that satirized working-class period dramas of the 1970s. Tidy was critical of the series, noting that it bore several similarities to his work, specifically The Cloggies. [5] In an interview with the Liverpool Echo Tidy mentioned that he was not the first to see the similarities, as he had learned about them after reading a magazine article asking if he was going to pursue legal action. [6] Synopsis [ edit ] The strip was sub-titled an Everyday Saga in the Life of Clog Dancing Folk, which Tidy intended as a parody of the long-running BBC radio series, The Archers, which was subtitled an Everyday Story of Country Folk. [4] The strip also lampooned contemporary British sports culture and introduced an entire sub-culture of fictitious dance leagues, a governing body for the sport of clog dancing, and a deeply arcane and complex scoring system. [ citation needed] Similarities with Brass [ edit ] The strip has been credited with popularizing the word "cloggies", a slang term for clog dancers. [1] History [ edit ] Publication history [ edit ] 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. 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.

Critical reception at the time was negative, with journalists criticizing the musical for its humor. [11] A journalist for The Chester Chronicle panned the portrayals of the titular Cloggies while citing Stephen Nallon's impression of Margaret Thatcher as a highlight. [13] The Liverpool Echo's Walter Huntley also reviewed the musical, criticizing it for its poor sound quality and humor. [14] Exhibitions [ edit ] Month after month, Kegbuster and his faithful whippet fought the good fight for cask ale against the machinations of big brewers, pin-striped executives and steely-eyed marketing men, all the time finding time for a pint or three of his beloved Crudgington’s 6X. 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. His career took off and some of his strips had astonishing longevity. The Fosdyke Saga ran in the Daily Mirror from 1971 to 1985 and stopped only when the paper’s owner, that well-known humorist Robert Maxwell, said he didn’t find it funny. Millions did and loved its wry working-class re-working of the John Galsworthy novels and TV series the Forsyte Saga that followed the sexual misadventures of upper-class families living in Dorset and London. A number of ideas came together to produce The Cloggies, which appeared in Private Eye magazine from 1967 to 1981 and in The Listener magazine from 1985 to 1986. Clog dancing is a northern English tradition, a step dance by participants wearing wooden-soled clogs with leather uppers. Clog dancing sounds like a heavier version of tap dancing. At the time when the strip first appeared, most people thought of male folk dancers as effete; the popular image in most people’s minds was of Morris dancers wearing bells on their trousers and waving handkerchiefs. Tidy subverted this idea by making his team of dancers more like a rugby side; he said “They would be members of a ferociously vicious dance league in which their aesthetic mix of ballet and grievous bodily harm would make them supreme.” He invented imaginary moves like the Single Leg Arkwright, and the esoteric Wagstaffe-Crumblehome scoring system, to make the dances seem more realistic to fans of the strip. Students set up their own teams and enjoyed following Tidy’s rules.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. So popular the Fosdyke Saga was that it became the subject of a BBC 42-part radio series from 1983. The obituaries on TV, Radio and in the papers which followed the announcement of his death were many. And the accolades would have made him blush. The local TV station which got his birth and death dates mixed up. That would have made him laugh and undoubtedly draw something on paper, a napkin, a table cloth, a terracotta pot, a wall or anything else that was in reach as the gag pinged into his head. Hugely popular and phenomenally talented he was also a successful author, writer, after dinner speaker, and TV and radio presenter. 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.