"Of course," said Gerald Campion, "most of this down here is padding. Masses of it."

He passed his hand over the ample stomach beneath the Billy Bunter blazer. And sighed.

"I'm not as fat as viewers think I am," he said. He looked; right between the eyes as he said it, and dared me to disagree.

It is now 5˝ years (weary years to Campion) since the B.B.C. first fitted him into those tight check trousers, the padded blazer, and the pinpoint Greyfriars School cap, and put him on the air to play the best-known figure in English fiction next to Peter Pan and Sherlock Holmes. The "responsefulness," after a shaky start was, as Hurree Singh (now there's MY favourite of all Frank Richard's characters) would say, "terrific."

Since then Harry Wharton's, Bob Cherry's, Frank Nugent's and Johnny Bull's have said their "I say chaps" and departed, some to Her Majesty's Forces, some even into matrimony. There have been two "impot" bestowing Mr. Quelches and the current Coker is a better bad hat than those who have gone before.

Only Campion as the lying, thieving, cheating Bunter remains to tempt viewers to look on Children's Television. And adults will be doing it by the thousands this afternoon between 5.0 and 6.0. There is now a Bunter cult which bluffs nobody. Adults say, of course, and nobody is fooled, that they do it strictly in the line of duty. To see, as in my case, whether the adventures I read long ago under the school desks ("Cave, chaps!") or under the bed-clothes by the light of my Boys' Wonder-send-no-money-satisfaction-guaranteed-giant-shilling-flashlight are suitable television fare in this rockin^’, rollin^’ age.

They are, and everybody is happy. Everybody that is, except Gerald Campion, who fears that he is stuck with Billy Bunter, his jam tarts, his "yarroos" and his "leggos" for the rest of his natural life. He has been an actor since the age of 14 and now at 32, the father of two, he would like to do something else. Although he confesses that at school he had enough flesh on his bones to warrant being called "Fatty," he trots out the figures on his weight with all the vehemence of a starlet issuing more vital statistics.

"Eleven stone twelve, and five feet five high," he intones. Then, of course, he goes on: "And it's not all fat. Squash and tennis see to that."

But, apparently, Bunter addicts refuse to believe it.

There are always diet charts in his fan mail. He still tries to force a weak smile when: he asks for a steak in a restaurant and a convulsed waiter, glancing at his waistline, and recognising him from the "tele", suggests jam tarts instead.

At his home in Battersea his two children, Anthony and Anthea, are not amused that their father's fame is built on a foundation of solid flesh. And in the club in the West End which he has run for the last six years ("You can't live off Bunter") members tend unnecessarily to count their change twice.

He has one consolation. Letters from Frank Richards, who at 86 has written 60,000,000 words about Greyfriars, indicate that he is well pleased with Campion as Bunter. There is talk too of making a film in which he will star.

"You've filmed a lot, of course?" I asked.

"I have," said Campion, "Spivs, and doormen and furtive parts like that. And, of course, as the fat boy in Pickwick Papers."

"I remember that," I said.

"Everybody does," said Campion. "Seems I'll go on playing 'fatties' for ever.

[Reproduced from The Collectors’ Digest, 1956, Volume 10, Number 118, page 284, by kind permission of the Editor, Mary Cadogan.]