Okay, it's a bit silly to kick off a new regular feature with a furry puppet whose heyday was in the 1980s, but it's a story that MUST BE TOLD. See, Gordon The Gopher was a big part of millions of Brits' childhood years, yet while sidekick Philip Schofield has gone on to bigger and brighter things (well, This Morning), Gordon disappeared without trace. So what happened?
His Wikipedia entry suggests that Schofield has since claimed that Gordon became an alcoholic and then died in a ram-raiding accident. Meanwhile, this spoof website claims Gordon committed suicide after being exposed for "scenes of red hot gopher action", and was then "skinned and used as a wig". What is it with puppets and people's wild imaginations?
Another site, The Bubble Burst, claims that the original Gordon puppet went missing when Schofield left the BBC, but that "a badly decomposed body found in a BBC locker was identified as Gordon". But puzzlingly, musician Debbie Curtis claims on her official website that the puppet's living with her and touring the world. It's all too confusing.
More Where Are They Now? later this week, and it'll be a human being, not a furry faux-animal. Unless Roland The Rat's people get back to us, of course. [Stuart Dredge]