Watch: Welsh rock ‘n’ roll star Shakin’ Stevens attack Richard Madeley on live TV

When Richard Madeley was taken to hospital after falling ill at a castle in Wales, you could be forgiven for thinking that the surroundings prompted nightmares of his encounter with Welsh royalty – of the rock ‘n’ roll variety.

Forget the trials the contestants on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here have to endure, the television presenter’s most testing moment on TV came 40 years ago, when as a pre-fame, fresh faced, 24-year-old reporter he came face to face with Shakin’ Stevens on Yorkshire TV show Calendar Goes Pop.

Sat on a sofa between Shaky and fellow rock hedonists Status Quo, you can only surmise that that the Prince of Wails had enjoyed the hospitality in the green room a little too much. Mix in Madeley getting the singer’s name wrong and add a dash of poorly worded questions and you have a volatile cocktail.

Unsurprisingly, it’s all too much for the Welshman who with a disdainful sideways glance at the camera which suggests ‘who is this idiot?’ he launches himself at what many people consider is the nearest thing we have on television to a real life Alan Partridge.

Egged on by Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt who find the whole thing hilarious, Shaky then does something many people have wished they could have done over the years and puts Madeley in a headlock much to the hilarity of the Quo.

This incident crops up in many Shaky interviews over the years and he’s always happy to indulge the interviewer.

“He was shouting: ‘Watch my watch, watch my watch!’ But he just wouldn’t listen. I don’t think he’d done his research,” he told The Independent last year. “He asked what it was like to be a revivalist. He was insinuating that was all I did. And of course the Status Quo guys are naughty, ’cause all they’re doing is giggling away.

“And I said to him: ‘It’s a good job you didn’t have bloody Jerry Lee Lewis on the chair next to you, ’cause he’d have thrown a piano at you!’”

Ludicrous

And then in a chat with The Guardian in 2016, he recalled: “I’d been doing endless radio and TV stuff. I’d been there since early in the morning, all the interview questions were really badly researched and I just thought, “This is ludicrous” and leapt on him on the sofa. He was going: “Oh my watch, oh my hair!”

“There’s nothing wrong with being mad. I met Richard again years later and he said what a prat I was!”