Be disciplined and patient during coronavirus ‘war’, urges BGT’s Colin Thackery
The Britain’s Got Talent champion said that he finds the stockpiling of toilet roll ‘highly amusing’.
Britain’s Got Talent winner Colin Thackery has compared the coronavirus crisis to wartime, and urged people to be disciplined.
The Chelsea Pensioner, 90, recalled his younger years during the Second World War, and said that people need to “just be patient” when trying to buy food while the country remains in lockdown.
Thackery told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “It is a war, no doubt about it, and it’s one we’ve got to fight and to fight a war you’ve got to be disciplined and you’ve got to do as you’re told, otherwise we’ll never win.
“It’s very similar in some ways. I was talking to my grandchildren a little while back and saying during the war, older people of my age will remember if you saw a queue outside a butcher’s shop for example, you’d join it, you wouldn’t have the foggiest what they’d sell, you’d join it and you might get a couple of sausages or a couple of pieces of meat.
“But that’s the sort of thing that happened. But you see these days it’s completely different because we have wonderful communications, we have a marvellous health service, and plenty of food of course, if people would only wait and wait for their share, as it were.”
Asked for his advice for people living under the current circumstances, which have seen people panic buying items in shops, Thackery said: “Just be patient, wait.”
The singer and Army veteran added: “The thing I find highly amusing is this business about all the toilet roll, why toilet roll for heaven’s sake?
“What do they expect is going to happen to us?”
Thackery, who was the oldest person ever to win Britain’s Got Talent in 2019, was born in 1930, nine years before the start of the Second World War, and he served in the Royal Artillery in the Korean War.
Thackery also told the programme that he was honoured to be asked to be an ambassador for the Dame Vera Lynn children’s charity.
He said: “I’ve been attached to Dame Vera Lynn for years, I sing her songs, I sang a song with her electronically speaking when I made my album, and she’s a great lady.
“I was deeply honoured to be asked to be an ambassador for her charity.”
