SUCH FASCINATING CHARACTERS

"Wait a minute... I know that face..."

John Abineri

One of my stranger idiosyncrasies is that, whilst I am hardly likely to recognise anyone from the current crop of so-called celebrities and “well-known” faces, I am (or at least used to be) able to pick out the faces of a whole host of character actors from the TV programmes and films of the 1960s and 1970s who other people might not know from Adam.

I mention this in the full knowledge that I once mentioned Cary Grant in a conversation at work and was met with blank stares and a resounding “Who?” from some of my co-workers who were barely five years younger than I was. They could have told you all about the ins and outs of the personal lives of all of the then-current casts of “Hollyoaks” or EastEnders”, or everything about the performers then riding high in the “hit parade”, but wouldn’t have known who John Abineri or Kevin Stoney or Talfryn Thomas or Peter Halliday were, even if you’d brought them over to say hello…

Nor, I suspect, would they have cared all that much.

Mind you, it works both ways. The last episode of “Coronation Street” I knowingly watched was Stan Ogden’s funeral, and the last time I saw “EastEnders”, Michelle Fowler was taking her last taxi ride out of the Square. In fact the last dealings I had with anything resembling a “Soap Opera” was shortly after Nigel Pargetter plunged from the roof of his ancestral seat and I realised that I didn’t want to invest in such characters any more when they could be arbitrarily dispatched at the whim of a passing scriptwriter.

As I don’t watch shows like “The Apprentice” or “Britain’s Got Talent” or “The ‘X’ Factor” or “Big Brother” and have finally abandoned “BBC Breakfast” after its “extreme close-up” move to Salford, the faces from those shows also remain unfamiliar to me also, as do any of the famous faces of the footballists.

If I did go out and people were to nudge me and say “Do you know who that is over there…?” I could, in all honesty, probably say no…

You see, the shows that I do watch (or at least used to before the world of blogging sucked me into its wicked web) were things like “The Avengers” and “The Saint” and “Callan” and “The Prisoner” and “Doctor Who” and “Blake’s Seven” and “Survivors”, shows that were made in the 1960s and 1970s in and around the London area and which called upon a limited pool of actors and directors who were constantly trotting across to Shepperton or Pinewood or Television centre for a few day’s work playing a villain or a tramp or a butler in whichever adventure series happened to be in front of the cameras that week.

This was a golden era where a great many fine character actors managed to make a living hopping between the various shows and, whilst many of them never became “household names” (unless you are referring to our house, of course) they did become very familiar faces, and made a living by being constantly working, which is really the best definition of being a “successful” actor that I can think of: one who is working.

It often surprises me when I look up certain “big” names from those times on the Internet Movie Database - IMDb.com - and find out how long it now is since they made an appearance on a TV screen or Film. Names like Susan Penhaligon or Prunella Gee, who were ubiquitous on the telly of my youth but who then seemed to vanish, certainly as far as TV appearances go, although I’m sure that they continued to tread the boards somewhere beyond the gaze of those wider audiences.

A couple of years ago, I was sitting in a chair at my mother’s flat and she insisted upon watching “Emmerdale” and whilst I mostly managed to distract myself with other things to do, I was astonished to see Linda Thorsen and Patrick Mower playing roles in this nonsense.

It’s all work though, luvvie, isn’t it…?

Anyway, here’s to all those great yet obscure names that a lot of people probably wouldn’t even recognise. To Cyril Luckham and Preston Lockwood. To Prentis Hancock and Zenia Merton. To Derren Nesbitt and Mark Eden. To Denis Lill and Angela Browne.

You enriched our world and you are not forgotten.

But talking about forgetting, what about Michael Goodliffe, Edward Burnham, Christopher Benjamin, or George Pastell…? Then there are actors like Cyril Shaps, John Woodnutt, Eunice Gayson, Bernard Kay, Derek Farr, Fabia Drake, Anthony Bate, Dudley Sutton, Liz Fraser, Kenneth Griffith, Geoffrey Bayldon, Laurence Naismith, Colin Jeavons, Carol Cleveland, Douglas Wilmer, Moray Watson, Victor Maddern, Vladek Sheybal, Philip Latham, Edwin Richfield, Henry Woolf, T.P. McKenna, Michael Gough, Ronald Radd, Jack May, Annette Andre, Philip Locke, Paul Whitsun-Jones, Tenniel Evans, Hugh Burden, Harold Innocent, Norman Chappell, Bernard Archer… the list goes on and on… and could too if I didn’t stop it… because more and more of them come to mind as I sit here thinking about it.

We didn’t really know when we were well off, did we? Such a great generation or two of fabulous character actors, so few of whom ever became stars, but yet were as familiar to most of us as our own wallpaper and would prompt a million conversations along the lines of “I know that face! Where have we seen them before…?” Rather sadly, so many have them are long gone now, but of course we still have their work to enjoy.

Well, those of us who still watch those sorts of things do, anyway…

(First published in “The Lesser Blogfordshire Alternative” July 23rd 2012)