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Bob Fleming
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Bob Fleming is also an ice hockey player in the NHL.
Bob Fleming is a fictional character played by Charlie Higson in the hit BBC comedy sketch show The Fast Show, which ran for four series between 1994 and 2000.
Bob, who appeared in all of the series (albeit very briefly in series 3), is the aging host of daytime television show Country Matters, which he has presented for several years. He has an extremely bad cough - which is not only awkward, but irritating. Conveniently when rehearsing or off the air Bob's cough is fine.
The cough annoyed the producers so much that once or twice Bob was given a formal warning to get over the cough or be sacked. However this never stopped him (despite wasting all of his cough medicine by coughing it all over his dressing room) and his career grew to presenting Badger Watch where he scared badgers away with his coughing, and a Yule-tide folk music CD.
The CD, shown in a sketch in the Christmas Special, features Bob and his friends "Hiccuping" Murtagh Blethyn (Simon Day), 'Sneezing' Clive Tucker (who featured in the first series, played by Mark Williams) and the most prominent of all: Jed Thomas (Paul Whitehouse), who can't stop saying "arse" between sentences. Jed appeared again in The Last Fast Show Ever in a sketch where some of Bob's friends (including a sneezing man who is not Clive Tucker, and a woman who constantly belches and farts) show up to surprise him as he is filming the final episode of Country Matters, which has been cancelled after twenty years on the air.
The real-life inspiration for Bob Fleming was Jack Hargreaves.