Mark Speight ~ will be missed.12:45 Apr 14 2008
Times Read: 1,488
Police have confirmed that his body was found at 10am. In a statement, police said: "A formal identification is yet to take place but will be confirmed by tomorrow.
"The body has been removed from the scene and CCTV from the station has been seized as part of the ongoing investigation."
Police sources said the presenter had been found hanged.
Mr Speight discovered Miss Collins dead in the bath of their home in St John's Wood, north-west London, on Jan 3, with 60 per cent hot water burns to her body.
The couple, who met on the BBC children's show See It, Saw It and had been together for more than five years, had spent the previous evening "partying" on cocaine, sleeping pills, wine and vodka.
Police initially arrested Mr Speight on suspicion of murder and supplying Class A drugs, but he was not charged. Last week a coroner recorded a verdict of death by misadventure after noting that a "very significant" amount of cocaine was in Miss Collins's body at the time of her death.
Stu Goldsmith, Mr Speight's best friend, said last night: "There were always two sides to Mark, the warm, funny guy which he showed on TV and the sensitive guy which only his close friends knew about.
"I know Mark blamed himself for Natasha's death and it affected him considerably.
"In my opinion, the police have been a complete waste of time.
"Mark was in complete mental anguish and they should have doubled their efforts to find him."
Obituary:
Mark Speight, aged 42, was one of the most popular presenters on CBBC, the BBC's digital channel for children, and was best known as the face of its long-running art programme, SMart.
Launched in 1994, the show essentially built on the format devised for an earlier generation of children by the artist Tony Hart, and featured Speight and his co-presenter conducting a gallery tour of pictures sent in by children.
He also demonstrated how to draw cartoons and make collages in a tradition dating back to the early Blue Peter days of mutilated bottles of washing-up liquid and sticky-backed plastic.
One of his frequent items showed him making a small picture (often from coloured scraps of paper) and then a larger version on the floor, using carpet tiles or larger household items. Speight would switch between the two when a buzzer sounded, gurning the while, and swapping hats to indicate the picture he was working on.
Speight left the show abruptly at the end of February, having announced that he was unable to continue following the drug-related death of his fiancée Natasha Collins, with whom he had appeared in another BBC children's programme, See It Saw It, in 1999 Mark Speight had first achieved television fame the year before as the rubber-faced presenter of ITV's Saturday morning programme Scratchy & Co, which was nominated for a Bafta for best children's entertainment show. He went on to star in On Your Marks for the BBC and Name That Toon for Granada, which earned him a nomination as best presenter for tw In The Toon Room Speight again drew on his artistic expertise to teach children how to draw cartoons. In See It Saw It, Speight played a king who rules over the kingdom of Much Jollity-On-The-Mirth. The character was unable to make a decision and relied on the assistance of his jesters, See and Saw, one of whom was played by the actress Natasha Collins. Speight and Collins began dating, became engaged and later shared a flat in north London. She died after being badly burnt in the bath there on January 3.
Mark Warwick Fordham Speight was born on August 6 1965 at Trowbridge, Wiltshire. His father was a property consultant and his mother an art teacher. After a year at Tettenhall College, a public school near Wolverhampton, he was moved aged 12 to the nearby Regis comprehensive (now the King's C of E) school, where he was bullied daily for two years. Although he fared badly at school, and left at 16, he went on to obtain a degree in Commercial and Graphic Art.
His ambition had been to become a cartoonist, but he broke into television after hearing about auditions for the SMart programme while working on the set of another production. Working with various co-presenters, Speight became the face of the show from its launch in 1994.
In the 1990s, as well as starring in ITV's Saturday morning children's show Scratchy & Co, he appeared in a range of other programmes, hosting the game show Beat The Cyborgs (CITV), SMarteenies (on CBeebies) and, for the Discovery Kids channel, History Busters, a 13-part series of short films which won a Royal Television Society award in 2003. He was always a lively and engaging presence on screen.
(Sourced from the Telegraph, 14th April 2008)
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