And Finally Artist News

Why was the Five Star ‘apology’ so fucking crap?

By Andy Malt | Published on Monday 7 October 2019

1980s pop outfit Five Star recently received an apology for being called “fucking crap” on children’s TV show ‘Going Live’ back in the day. But was that apology actually from the person who delivered the sweary critique on live TV? Because while it appeared that this infamous Five Star story had finally been drawn to a close after 30 years, since then numerous other people have come forward to claim that they were actually the caller, who went by the name Eliot Fletcher.

These recent events all began when Five Star’s Doris Pearson tweeted that she’d quite like to meet the boy who called in that time to berate her and her siblings on the popular Saturday morning kids show. Later someone claiming to be that person – who had been gleefully tweeting as such for several years – came forward to say sorry, although they refused to meet with Pearson to deliver any apologies face to face.

But not long afterwards, others began claiming that they were in fact the real Eliot Fletcher. And not just other Eliot Fletcher accounts on Twitter either, but also some non-Eliots who claimed that they had given a false name when they got through to the ‘Going Live’ switchboard.

BBC reporter Mark Savage – having first written up a report on the original ‘apology’ – has been fielding many of these subsequent claims and digging deeper.

It now seems that the Eliot Fletcher account on Twitter that delivered the apology – which has now fallen silent – is absolutely not operated by the real caller. Savage has, however, identified a more likely contender – someone with a cassette recording of the call from the caller’s end with extra swearing that was cut off on TV when producers quickly faded out the shouting.

This person says that they were actually a big fan of Five Star, but that they had become disillusioned with the group after they had, as he saw it, “sold out”. He also claims to have written a half-hearted apology to the BBC afterwards at the insistence of his mother. As for whether he’d apologise directly to Five Star now, he says: “No. No apologies. What’s done is done. As an adult you kind of feel slightly different about it, but the child in me is like, ‘No'”.

Whether or not this person is indeed the real ‘Eliot Fletcher’ is something we’re unlikely to ever know for certain. Already there are others lining up to call this second Eliot’s authenticity into question. Because it seems like a lot of people out there want to be Eliot Fletcher. And who can blame them? Who wouldn’t want to be given the credit for one of the most significant events in human history?

Maybe it doesn’t matter who the real caller that day was though. In many ways, we are all Eliot Fletcher. And it’s unlikely we’ll ever all be sorry.