Brian Cant - Wound up and ready to play

Any tribute to my TV heroes and heroines simply has to begin with Brian Cant. Even more than Junior Choice radio presenter Ed Stewart, his kind, reassuring and perennially cheery voice provided the definitive soundtrack to my early years. I would imagine my introduction to Brian came in May 1964 when he first presented Play School.

The BBC targeted the daily show, broadcast on weekdays at 11am, at pre-school children, but I’m sure I remained with it beyond the age of five, if only on sick days or outside term-time, probably using Catherine as an excuse.

Each morning I’d be ready to knock and turn the lock, entranced by the simple songs, games and film clips, wondering through which shaped window they would appear. The French bicycling onion seller was a recurring favourite, I recall, and the avuncular Ted Moult taught me a lot about farms. Play School must have guaranteed Mum twenty-odd minutes to get on with stuff around the house knowing the show was distracting me from any form of mischief-making.

Brian – I find it impossible to refer to him as merely ‘Cant’ – wasn’t the only presenter of the show. I can just about remember the lugubrious face of Gordon Rollings, as well as Brian’s frequent co-host Julie Stevens and the Canadian Rick Jones. I think the musician Wally Whyton also appeared, his voice familiar from an EP of children’s songs we played constantly on our trusty record player. BBC2 didn’t broadcast in colour until my sixth birthday but I doubt I ever watched Brian Cant in anything other than black-and-white, hence my shock at finding the above photo of him, in the company of Humpty (brown and purple! Who knew?). 

He was only slightly older than Mum so, despite being in his early thirties, he wouldn’t have seemed out of place talking or singing to me, not that I’d have pondered such issues at the time. Brian was too good an entertainer to be restricted to under-fives and in 1971 he and several other Play School regulars upgraded to the afternoon show Play Away (right, with Julie Stevens and, yes, that is Jeremy Irons).

By then, I was ten but certainly no longer immune to the Cant charm, nor that of his fellow presenters like the elastic-limbed Derek Griffiths, Carol Chell, the guitar-wielding Lionel Morton and Johnny Ball. By the mid-Seventies, even I deemed myself too far beyond the target audience’s upper age limit so missed most of Brian’s performances on both these children’s classics. There must have been hundreds of them. But of course he has lived on in other ways.

I don’t suppose many of his monochrome on-screen appearances have survived in the BBC archives or YouTube library. However, Brian Cant’s voice will live on forever as narrator of the Bura-Hardwick-Murray animation series Camberwick Green, Trumpton and Chigley. The latter came too late for me to watch them with mother but the 26 episodes of the first two were essential viewing. Whether introducing the musical box (“wound up and ready to play”), uttering Captain Flack’s fire station roll-call (“Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew,….”) or merely inhabiting the characters of Chippy Minton or Doctor Mopp, Brian always struck the right degree of mateyness and enthusiasm without going over the top.

He may not have been the greatest technical singer but, if asked to name the most influential musician of my infant school period, I wouldn’t say The Beatles, the Stones, nor even The Monkees. No, it would have to be Brian and the acoustic guitar of Freddie Phillips. Five decades on, effortlessly reciting the lyrics of Windy Miller or “Driving along in a baker’s van/farmer’s truck/army truck” (delete as applicable) I am mentally channelling my inner Cant, his lilt and diction leaping unbidden into my head.

Of course, Brian Cant was an actor: living proof that acting training isn’t just for Shakespeare or Emmerdale. He did have a few other TV parts beyond wearing flowery shirts and colourful hats. I would certainly have seen him in a couple of Doctor Who series, although I have no recollection of either. Mind you, in each case he was killed off. Terry Nation even had the temerity of making him an episode one victim of the Daleks. The only dramatic role I can recall happened more recently, in a 2005 edition of Casualty, although at first I didn’t recognise the balding bloke in his seventies. I don’t know if his character was exterminated in this, too, but in real life he lasted a further twelve years before he was sadly beaten by Parkinson’s Disease.

When I heard the news, it felt as if a small part of me had died with him. However, to a whole generation of viewers, Brian Cant is immortal. Whether in the company of Big Ted, Little Ted and Hamble or in the persona of Farmer Bell or Mrs Honeyman, he will live on long after I am dead and buried.