A nineties kids’ TV legend has quit fame - and now has a very different job after 15 years off screen. Timmy Mallett was adored by millions of children in the eighties and nineties.
But now the legendary ITV kids star has teamed up with Pension Attention to raise awareness of workers' pension pots. He said: "I suspect people in their thirties often think about their pension and feel they don’t need to engage, assuming it’s something to address as you approach stopping work.
"But trust me, careers aren’t linear, and you might wake up one morning and suddenly you're 55 and you go, crikey, what happened there? It zips along. That’s why it’s so important to think back to those different jobs over the years and think about any pensions that may be associated."
Mallett also reflected on ITV axing CITV, where he made a name for himself. He told the Sun: "It’s just a different way of accessing the material, so the programmes are still there and children will always find them. If you look at the TV figures, people say ‘oh it’s got an audience like that or this’ well if you were to compare that with children’s TV audiences right up there, they’re enormous. Kids find them."
CITV will disappear as a standalone channel in the autumn, with all children’s content shifting to the streaming platform ITVX. The broadcaster said the channel was unprofitable and children’s TV audiences had collapsed in recent years because of a shift to YouTube and other streaming services.
ITV said the average time spent by British children watching children’s television channels had declined by 62% since 2019. Mallett added: "The home grown talent and programming is there, they’re just not on at mainstream times. We used to come home from school and Blue Peter would be on with everything else, now you’ve got to go to your own channel to find it."
