In a taxi with… Rolf Harris

By Maureen Paton
Last updated at 8:01 PM on 26th June 2010

The much-loved octogenarian Aussie artist talks beards, Beatles and his new exhibition
Rolf Harris

The great thing about Rolf Harris is that you don’t have to explain who he is to the taxi driver. Rolf has been on our TV screens for nearly 60 years and our cabbie, Mike from Kingston-on-Thames, has grown up with him just like everyone else.
A former schoolboy swimming champ, Rolf has triumphantly surfed the waves of every new career challenge. He’s been a cartoonist, actor, chart-topping singer-songwriter, family entertainer, didgeridoo player, animal whisperer, pop festival favourite and artist. And there’s no mistaking his distinctive, self-styled ‘weirdie beardie’ look: Rolf is flashmobbed by passers-by as he poses for our photographer.
‘I did once shave my beard off but my wife Alwen was horrified and said I looked like a big American car without the chromework,’ says the Australian-born Rolf, who met his Welsh wife at the City & Guilds Art School in South London’s Kennington back in 1954. ‘She thought I was mad, I thought she was stuck-up, but we met again when we were both accepted for the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition two years later – and we married in 1958,’ says Rolf. They live on the Berkshire show-business belt in the same street as Michael Parkinson, and have a daughter, Bindi, 46, and a grandson, Marlon, 14.
Now a sprightly 80, Rolf is ageless enough to have never gone out of fashion. Even what he calls his ‘nerdy’ spectacles are bang on trend. ‘Physical age doesn’t mean anything, it’s what’s in your head that counts – and my mental age is about 15,’ he says. No wonder he’s performing at Glastonbury this year for the sixth time and is also lined up for the Isle of Wight’s Bestival – with Dizzee Rascal and the Chemical Brothers also clamouring to work with him in the future.
‘Physical age doesn’t mean anything, it’s what’s in your head that counts – and my mental age is about 15’
‘Michael Eavis called me the best entertainer ever to appear at Glasto. They had originally put me on as the Sunday morning wake-up man for a joke, but the crowd sang every word of every song and held up notices saying “Tie me Down, Rolf” and “I Want to Didgeridoo You”.’ So how does it feel to be hip? ‘It feels good,’ says this veteran popster, whose Aussie songs were re-recorded by the Beatles’ producer George Martin (‘because he was the one that EMI sent all the weirdies to’). For a BBC radio performance in 1963, the Beatles even sang backing vocals to Rolf’s ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’.
‘I equate retiring with lying down and dying. I’ve been so lucky because I’ve been able to do what I love as a career,’ continues Rolf, currently celebrating 66 years in art after making his debut as a self-portrait painter at 14. He came to London in 1952 to try to break into British TV, and landed a BBC job drawing cartoons and fronting a children’s show called Jigsaw because its usual presenter refused to work with puppets.
Rolf will work with anyone if it’s the right project, as the nine million viewers of his ten-year hit BBC1 show Animal Hospital know. ‘The BBC bosses had wanted a 15-year-old for the job – but the producer said she had watched me all her life, and if I was as good with animals as I was with people I would be perfect.’
This summer sees a new London exhibition of Rolf’s paintings, but the crowning glory of his art career was being invited to paint Her Maj for a special edition of his BBC1 series Rolf On Art, the highest-rated arts programme in British TV history. ‘I told her that my grandfather had painted her grandfather, King George V, inspecting the troops at Flanders in the First World War,’ says Rolf.
Any regrets in this charmed life? ‘I would have loved to do animation like Wallace and Gromit, but each programme takes two to three years to create – and I wasn’t that dedicated.’
Rolf Harris’s A Life in Art exhibition opens this Friday at the new Clarendon Fine Art gallery, Dover Street, London W1