Plan B Forum

Tess and Chris Giddings knew when they started a family they would be making an inevitable contribution to multicultural Britain.

What they didn’t expect was that they’d start their own melting pot.



For the children produced by the blue-eyed blonde and her black-skinned husband cover just about every spectrum of the inter-racial rainbow. Or, as Chris proudly describes it: ‘We’re like a box of chocolates – dark ones, brown ones and white ones.’ The couple’s remarkable brood includes a daughter who shares mum’s fair skin and eye colour; her golden complexioned sister; their olive-skinned big brother; and the latest arrival, a button-nosed, black baby boy who looks just like dad.

Precisely how they ended up with four such different children is doubtless of great interest to geneticists, but it came as a surprise to Tess, a former model, and Chris, a store supervisor. At one stage they even wondered whether daughter Amiah, the palest on the Giddings family colour chart, might have been switched at birth with another child at Colchester General Hospital. Yet the couple’s attitude to rainbow family life is refreshingly black and white.

‘We couldn’t care less what colour they are,’ said Tess, 24. ‘They are a great joy to us and we couldn’t be happier.’

Joe Guy wrote:Does someone similar to Ferd Berfel live next door to them?

for you foreignors - The Farkel Family, a couple with many kids —all of whom had flaming red hair and freckles like neighbor Ferd Berfel (played by Dick Martin). Head of the family Frank Farkel (Rowan) never questioned this fact when Ferd visited. Most plots were excuses to force the cast into alliterative tongue-twisters ("That's a fine-looking Farkel flinger you found there, Frank"). Bespectacled baby daughter Flicker Farkel (played by Buzzi) had no lines except screaming "Hiiii!!!" Two of the kids were twins named Simon and Gar Farkel (played by cast members of different races; originally Goldie Hawn and Chelsea Brown, later Pamela Rodgers and Teresa Graves).