This is going to mean very little to U.S. noders, and probably even less to everyone else.
Bernie Clifton is one of the personalities that used to appear on children's TV in the UK during the 1970s. He is of the same sort of ilk as Derek Giffiths, and Brian Cant, except with possibly less talent.
Bernie Clifton's one talent will probably become obvious in a minute.
One evening, some twenty odd years after I or any of my companions that night, had last seen Bernie Clifton on television, we were haunted by the question, having spent far to long on that old chestnut of TV of yesteryear, of who was that fucker with the comedy ostrich? Well, we didn't actually discover the answer one that portentous night, but no prize for guessing who it was.
One can only truly grasp exactly how bereft of talent Mr Clifton was if I explain what a comedy ostrich was. Put simply, the ostrich in question was a bizarre cross between an puppet and a pair of trousers. Bernie would put his legs into this puppet/trouser contraption, such that his own legs filled the leg part of the suit. The ostrich also had a false pair of legs attached to it; one was meant to assume that Mr Clifton was actually riding said ostrich. A simliar phenomenon was Rod Hull and Emu, where the gag was that the emu attacked people. Whilst hardly a quantum leap in comedy terms, Rod Hull at least had the decency to have a gag. Sadly for Bernie Clifton, his gag was that he was riding an ostrich. This concept didn't lend itself to many comedy situations, though this didn't stop him trying.