The first thing that strikes you when you click onto Timmy Mallet’s website, is that nothing has changed since 1990. The man is exactly the same. He has undergone no radical transformation. There has been no discernible breakdown. There has been no crisis. To look at him now is to look at the man twenty years ago. He doesn’t even appear to have aged.
The second thing that strikes you is an overwhelming sense of tragedy… How, you wonder, can this be? Surely the ‘Mallet’ persona would have been the first thing to go once the lucrative television deals had dried up? Surely Mallet can see that this vainglorious love of his own televisual career is dangerous and pathological? Surely he knows he must move on? But no, he’s still there – and still a weirdo in full rut.
The third thing that strikes you is the notion that perhaps he was always like this. That, perhaps, the Hawaiian shirts, the twin baseball caps, the plasters, the shrill screaming, the oddly sexual language and the wackaday mallet are to his personality as, say, wetness is to the sea. That his job in children’s broadcasting was a happy accident; that he was born this way.
The fourth thing that strikes you is that somewhere along the way (after his career in television, and after his career in manufacturing schlocky memorabilia) Mallet has taken up painting. But not just any painting. This is the sort of weird, hypersensitive, sentimental granny-painting you’d expect to find in a Suburban B&B. They’re the type of paintings that, you imagine, might smell of Mattersons Liver Sausage, moth balls and week-old urine. It’s all sunrise this and waterfall that. Amazing, in short, and his captions for each painting are gold too.
It feels awful writing about him in this way, because something about TM makes me want to look after him. Besides, the man knows not what he does.
This is a painting of Jesus Christ, as seen by Mallet at the center of a 21st century Media scrum
This is a Seascape
This is another seascape
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