Freddie Starr - "Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster"

"Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster"

Freddie Starr was the subject of one of the best known British tabloid newspaper headlines. On 13 March 1986 The Sun carried as its main headline: FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER. According to the text of the story, Starr had been staying at the home of Vince McCaffrey and his 23-year-old girlfriend Lea La Salle in Birchwood, Cheshire, when the incident took place. Starr was claimed to have returned home from a performance at a Manchester nightclub in the early hours of the morning and demanded that Lea La Salle make him a sandwich. When she refused, he went into the kitchen and put her pet hamster Supersonic between two slices of bread and proceeded to eat it.

Freddie Starr gives his side of the story in his 2001 autobiography Unwrapped. He says that the only time that he ever stayed at Vince McCaffrey's house was in 1979 and that the incident was a complete fabrication. Starr writes in the book: "I have never eaten or even nibbled a live hamster, gerbil, guinea pig, mouse, shrew, vole or any other small mammal". The man behind the hamster story was the British publicist Max Clifford. When asked in a television interview with Esther Rantzen some years later whether Starr really had eaten a hamster, his reply was "Of course not". Clifford was unapologetic, insisting that the story had given a huge boost to Starr's career. In May 2006 the BBC nominated "FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER" as one of the most familiar British newspaper headlines over the last century. Starr's frustration at being linked perpetually to the hamster story was expressed in a newspaper interview, when he commented: "I'm fed up of people shouting out 'Did you eat that hamster, Freddie?' Now I say, give me £1 and I'll tell you. Then if they give me £1, I say 'No' and walk away." Starr says that the story came about after he made an offhand joke about eating a hamster in a sandwich.