Soap star to switch on town's Christmas lights

BIDFORD-ON-AVON has attracted yet another star of stage and screen to switch on its Christmas lights this year, courtesy of its own resident celebrity Karen Drury.

On Sunday 27th November former Coronation Street, Casualty, Eastenders and Heartbeat star Marji Campi will be in the village centre to click the magic switch at 6pm.

Last year David Neilson, who plays Roy Cropper in Coronation Street switched on the Bidford lights.

Marji also performed in the Channel 4 soap Brookside, which is when she met Karen, one of her co-stars in the series.

Other starring roles have been as Joyce Watson in Surgical Spirit between 1989 and 1995 and as Barbara Blythe, the mother of Jenny Gifford, in this year’s series of Cold Feet on ITV.

This month’s visit to Bidford will not be her first but it will be the first time she’ll have switched on Christmas lights anywhere. “I’m really looking forward to it,” she told the Herald this week.

By the time she arrives in Bidford she should be well refreshed. She and her husband, the writer Anton Gill, will have been on a boat trip around the coast of South America.

Marji is no stranger to life on the open seas. She’s performed in plays on the QE2. “It was

fabulous, swanning around the world,” she said.

And she’s lived in Paris, Venice and Barcelona – as well as Australia – so she can be considered to be a genuine woman of the world.

Switching on the Christmas lights in the village where William Shakespeare is reputed to have got drunk will be a new venture for her…

See this week's for a timetable of lights switch-ons across our patch and to win the chance to turn on Stratford-upon-Avon's lights.