Former Beatle’s new career

Press, 27 February 1989, Page 19

Former Beatle’s new career

By

KATHRYN BAKER

NZPA-AP New York

The eight-year-old girl offers up a piece of paper and a pen and pleads: "Could you just write one more?’

"You just want to be a big cheese in school, don’t ya?” says Ringo Starr, cigarette dangling from his mouth, as he cheerfully signs another autograph. The girl, Nicole Leach, is no pint-size autograph hound, but one of Starr’s co-stars on “Shining Time Station,” a new children’s television series in America. Starr, the rest of the cast and the producers made a cross-country promotional tour for “Shining Time Station,” which has received more than the usual publicity due to the presence of the former Beatle in the cast. “We all know it’s the truth. It’s a lot easier if I’m on the tour, too, because people want to come and ask what I’ve been doin’ for the last 100 years. But somewhere in there they mention the show,” said Starr, chatting in a suite overlooking Central Park.

Starr is already a children’s star in England, where he is heard but not seen as the narrator of the popular tot-appeal “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends.” In the American show, Starr plays Mr Conductor, a tiny special-effects figure who lives in the walls of the train station, popping up occasionally to entertain the children and help teach the simple lessons aimed at the pro-

gramme’s target audience, children aged four to seven.

"I’ve always enjoyed children,” Starr said. His own three children are grown and he has a three-year-old granddaughter, Tatia.

After the Beatles era, he said, “I sort of went to the kiddie crowd, so it was sort of a natural thing, you know. But to be magic and little, it was fabulous.”

Starr said he “can’t wait” to be as big a kiddie star in America as he is in England. After all, his career has not exactly been booming.

“The first half of the last 100 years, I was

really busy doing albums and records and films and everything, and then it all started sort of slowing down and slowing down, and lately I haven’t been doin’ much at all.

"So I’m just pleased at this opportunity,” he says with mock pitifulness. He said part of the reason for the career slide was his recently admitted alcohol problem. He and wife Barbara Bach checked into an un identified substance-abuse clinic in America last year.

“Yeah, I had an alcohol problem,” Starr, 48, said. “I still have the problem, of course, but I don’t drink any more. I’ve had the problem for a long

time. It’s been three months to yesterday that I haven’t had a drink — 90 days. I had to get help, and I got help, and I’m feeling better. It was just getting on top of me.” “I’m pulling myself together. I’m sort of starting the year off now, and we’ll do what we’re going to do. There’s really nothing laying around — ‘Oh, I’ve got this in the pipeline, and I’m reading these scripts.’

“There’s nothing like that at all. We’re startin’ the year clean. So, be interesting if you come and see me in December, and you’ll see what happened — ‘Oh, didn’t do a thing, eh?’ ”