[2] His parents were variety performers; his mother Lilian "Lila", née Simmons (1917–2018), was a dancer; his father, Norman Harris (1912–2005), was a singer, comedian and ventriloquist.

[6][7] Harris was severely dyslexic at school[6] and in 2014, he claimed that his dyslexia had cost him millions of pounds because of his inability to read contracts accurately.

Harris' best known creation, Orville the Duck, came about after he saw some green fur lying around backstage at a performance of The Black and White Minstrel Show in Bristol.

[2] Orville, recalled Simon Farquhar in his Independent obituary of Harris, was "a huge, gormless, falsetto-voiced green duckling sporting a nappy fastened by a giant safety pin".

[9] Alongside his continued pantomime performances, from the late 1990s Harris and Orville also enjoyed what The Stage described as a "long Indian summer" as they re-emerged on television in a new "era of knowing post-modern irony".

[2] He and Orville won the Channel 5 reality TV show The Farm in 2005,[6] the same year that he featured in Peter Kay and Tony Christie's music video to "(Is This the Way to) Amarillo".

[2] Harris lived with his fourth wife (married in 1999), Sarah Metcalf, and his two youngest children[18] (born in 2000), in Poulton-le-Fylde, where he converted the local cinema and bingo hall into a jazz nightclub called "Club L’Orange".

[10] The Telegraph, however, remarked that the 2002 Louis Theroux documentary exposed a "darker side" of Harris, "a nervous, edgy man who kept telling rotten jokes" and who struggled to forgive past slights against him.