'It was nice to get my own place, one without the rats'
Alongside his careers as a drummer and a comic, Charlie Chuck has spent his life buying and selling properties.
His first purchase, in 1976, set him back £1,750 and he remembers it as being a "quaint" little property but also a bit of a mess to start with.
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"It was a back-to-back with two bedrooms in Armley, Leeds, and it was a bit of work getting it nice," said the 65-year-old comedian, who has been based in Leicestershire for the past 35 years.
"I got a friend to help and he put a cement mixer in the living room and flung cement at the holes in the walls.
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"I went to auctions and bought some furniture and carpets. It was a bit different once I was done.
"I like places to be colourful and I decorated it with Charlie Chaplin and The Three Stooges posters and pottery animals – things that would probably we worth quite a bit now."
Buying the property had been a bit of a struggle for Charlie, who found himself having to tell a tiny white lie: "I was mostly stoney broke back then.
"I needed £300 for the deposit so I sold my van for £100, borrowed some money from my dad and used some cash I'd saved.
"When it came to exchanging contracts I still didn't quite have all the money so I lied and told them I was going off on a three-and-a-half-week holiday to get myself some extra time!"
After settling into the colourful abode, Charlie was only there for about three months.
He was living a nomadic lifestyle that year, doing the summer season entertaining holidaymakers in Scotland and then, after getting his first house, heading off to play for the troops in West Germany with his band, Dawnbreakers.
He said: "I liked the house a lot. It was quaint and it was in a nice area of Leeds.
"Before moving to Leeds I'd been up in Ayrshire, Scotland, staying in a woman's attic with a lot of rats who used to scurry about all night long.
"It was nice to get my own place. Somewhere without the rats.
"But I'd been working as a professional drummer since I was 18 and not long after I bought the house in Armley my band got work in Germany playing for the troops. We were out there quite a few months.
"While I was away I was getting paid for the band, plus £33 a month from renting the Armley house, which I kept for about eight years.
"I was doubling my money and I realised what a great market there was for buying places and renting them out.
"When I got back from Germany I had enough money to buy another house which was about £5,000 and I've been buying houses ever since."
Charlie, who appeared as Uncle Peter on The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer and is a regular at the Edinburgh Festival and Leicester Comedy Festival, now lives in a cottage in a village to the south of Leicester.
He said: "I live in a nice little village in the Kibworth area, where I have a cottage. I'm very settled there."
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