Jan Francis - more than just good friends

I’ve already waxed lyrical about the attraction of Cherie Lunghi. No, I haven’t changed my mind. However, when it comes to the eye department, Jan Francis had won me over long before I’d ever heard of the Manageress star. In the early Seventies she was a TV regular in children’s drama. I probably first saw her in Anne of Green Gables although this was more my sister’s bag than mine. Later in 1972, I’d just started secondary school when The Long Chase began a thirteen-part run.

Following Blue Peter on Monday evenings, homework had to take a back seat because this adventure serial starring Francis and another children’s TV regular, Simon Turner, became essential viewing. I can’t recall the plot, other than the stars were either on the run or in search of something around the country trying to evade the sinister attentions of the leather-clad Hilary Minster on a motorbike.

They were supposedly teenagers although Jan Francis, then sporting long dark hair, was already well in her mid-twenties. It didn’t matter in the slightest, at least not to an eleven year-old. It was quite an exhilarating ride, with high production values for a children’s show. This was hardly surprising given it was created by prolific Seventies BBC uber-producer Gerard Glaister and written by regular collaborator NJ Crisp, who together at the time were also responsible for Colditz and The Brothers.

Apart from guest appearances in a few series such as The Duchess of Duke Street, the next time I watched Jan Francis in a major role came five years hence in another Glaister production, Secret Army. We watched every week without fail, following the trials and tribulations of the wartime Belgian Resistance running an escape line for Allied airmen under the noses of Nazi forces. Francis played ‘Yvette’, who ran the operation using the cover of a popular café, owned by Bernard Hepton’s ‘Albert’. With all manner of intrigue, conflicts within as well as between the Resistance and the Germans, and an excellent cast it was a beguiling blend of suspense and melodrama. However, it was so earnest that it provided rich pickings for a send-up. Come the Eighties, Allo Allo mercilessly ripped the piss out of Secret Army, from the basic set-up, costumes and characters. Personally I will never again see Jan in her raincoat and beret without hearing Kirsten Cooke uttering her immortal catchphrase: “Listen very carefully, I shall say zis only wurnce”….

It’s not unusual for actors to work with directors, producers or fellow thesps on several projects over the years. Jan Francis is no exception. Between 1985 and 2007, I saw her in three dramas, each of them starring Dennis Waterman. I recall her playing the posh girlfriend of Waterman’s ‘Terry’ in Minder (obviously their on-screen relationship could never last!) then the two of them topped the bill in ITV’s Stay Lucky. This continued the theme of an unlikely emerging relationship involving a dodgy geezer and posh totty and ran for four series between 1989 and 1993.

Good old Dennis was still “singing the feem tune” in the Noughties on New Tricks and in one 2007 episode, he and Jan Francis were reunited, along with ageing Minder co-star George Cole. Jan’s hair may have boasted highlights appropriate to a fashionable sixty year-old but those blue eyes were as intense as ever. 

Two years had passed when she portrayed another well-spoken lady of a certain age in Mistresses. She was mixing it with four brilliant female leads including Sarah Parish and Orla Brady, and I could imagine her younger self being similarly successful in the series. Nevertheless, her career as chic, smart, shrewd but somewhat uptight young women reached its apogee in the Eighties sitcom Just Good Friends.

Essentially it was a love story. Jan’s Penny Warrender was one half of another ‘will-they-won’t-they?’ relationship with a jack-the-lad, this time in the form of her ex-fiance Vince, played with an understated knowing twinkle by Paul Nicholas. It was sweet without being cosy, intelligent but not up itself, and the likeable leads brought a freshness to the John Sullivan script. At the time Just Good Friends was even more popular than Sullivan’s contemporary masterpiece Only Fools and Horses, commanding audiences above twenty million. The 1986 climactic Christmas episode was wrapped up with the inevitable wedding and left the series on a high.

It didn’t establish itself in the manner of Only Fools, and it’s perhaps sad that we can’t enjoy Jan Francis endlessly on Dave or UK Gold in the twenty-first century. Perhaps an enduring catchphrase might have helped but JGF wasn’t that kind of comedy. Nevertheless for a few decades she was a regular feature on our screens and worthy of a place in my pantheon of TV treasures.

John Craven - Innovator turned part of the TV Furniture

Remember the TV news as it used to be? At primary school age, I hated the news. All that bleak stuff in black and white would have looked no brighter in colour. Vietnam, the Northern Ireland Troubles, industrial relations bills, Heath and Wilson, would be paraded night after night following the Magic Roundabout or Grandstand, boring me to tears.

Without exception the bulletins were read by middle-aged blokes like ITV’s Sandy Gall and Alastair Burnet or the Beeb’s Richard Baker and Kenneth Kendall, sitting stiffly behind a desk, an emergency phone its only ornament. Then, in April 1972, along came John Craven’s Newsround, and current affairs broadcasting would never be the same again.

Although already in his thirties John Craven was a breath of fresh air. The programme may have been scheduled in the middle of ‘children’s hour’ at around five o’clock but this was no dumbed-down bulletin focussed on Action Man sales or fluffy animals. Newsround treated its young audience as intelligent human beings, the BBC’s credentials for integrity and impartiality present and correct, as were many of the ‘grown up’ Evening News’ correspondents like Martin Bell or Reg Turnill.

There was no soft-soaping the major stories, either. Whether it was economic crisis, Cold War clashes or papal assassination attempts, they were all featured. The running order might sometimes have been different from the BBC’s 5.40 (later Six) broadcast but the only concession to the younger viewer was the use of more accessible, more measured language.

I particularly loved the science and environmental stories, usually ignored or downplayed in the main bulletins. This was a major factor in my viewing Newsround  not just into my secondary school years but well into my teens. Even a current affairs connoisseur like Dad was suitably impressed.

During the ‘70s, John Craven became more and more casual in his appearance. The initial ties were discarded, colourful pullovers taking over, and (shock, horror!) he would sit in front of, not behind, the desk. Two decades later, the media marvelled at Channel 5’s fresh innovation of Kirsty Young doing the same but although John didn’t parade any shapely pins, he was way ahead of his time.

My Newsround days were almost totally behind me by the time John Craven departed in 1989. At first glance I mistook one of his successors, the late Helen Rollason as his daughter. Well, she had similar hair and eyes. Enough to confuse little ol’ me, anyway. As for Craven, he more or less disappeared from my TV - but not everyone else’s. I once caught him with Kenny Everett but I’d never seen him at the weekend on Swap Shop or its successor Saturday Superstore and I wasn’t about to join the Sunday morning cult audience for a new topical feature strand on rural affairs called Country File.

Working in audience research at the Beeb I did observe its growth in popularity. More significantly, so did senior managers, schedulers and channel controllers. Mum raved about it, too. However, it wasn’t until Countryfile was promoted to a primetime slot in 2009 that I dipped my toe in the water. The association with John Craven was, admittedly, a prime motive.

I never made the programme a weekly staple but, when living alone, it was one of those useful ‘filler’ shows I could watch with one eye whilst eating or ironing. The week’s weather segment near the end was a major draw but, while I found a full hour of ploughing, salt marsh conversion and cattle auctions a tad overwhelming, the most interesting pieces were those presented by good old John Craven.

The mop of dark hair may have turned silver but there was something comforting about seeing John, his gentle Yorkshire voice intact, rocking up in his unblemished bright red or blue waxed jacket, an elbow perched on a wooden gatepost. No matter the stunning bucolic backdrop, he would totally command my attention. It wasn’t just about being terribly nice. It was his topical investigative reports I would look out for. Besides the Newsround heritage factor, he was authoritative yet accessible – the perfect combination.

In the last decade, save for seemingly endless promotion of the annual Countryfile calendar photography competition, John Craven’s appearances on screen have become more sporadic as ruddy-cheeked youth has advanced to the fore. But however much Matt Baker, Tom Heap, Ellie Harrison or Anita Rani attempt the same casual bonhomie, it’s never quite the same. 

We all have much to thank John Craven for. He has been largely responsible for not one, but two British TV institutions creeping out of the shadows into the spotlight. That is no mere coincidence. 

James Ellis - everyone's favourite Northern Irishman?

Typecasting used to be a dirty word in the acting profession. However these days it can be a double-edged sword. Many actors have made a very decent living supplementing their stage work playing a bunch of nurses, cops or Northern scallies on the box.

That Belfast legend James Ellis was never quite that restricted but for decades his TV roles demanded the wearing of different uniforms It all started in the Sixties with Z Cars. As far back as I can remember we had this groundbreaking series on our screens. Long before I could appreciate the characterisation and social commentary present in the tales of a mobile squad of Merseyside coppers I came to know all the characters.. Z Cars made stars of Brian Blessed, Stratford Johns, Colin Welland and others but, unlike most American fare at the time and most UK crime shows ever since it was a real ensemble cast. It was, if you like, The Bill of its day, social realism well to the fore. Then there was the distinctive theme tune, still earning its keep at Goodison Park welcoming the Everton players onto the pitch.

The only member of the Newtown police station who was (almost) ever-present from 1962 to its rather dull denouement in 1978 denouement was Bert Lynch, portrayed by Ellis, a rare chance to hear a Northern Irish accent outside the News. Apparently hardly any episodes remain from the late Sixties/early Seventies era when I would watch it regularly, which is a real shame. In those days, Lynch was the desk sergeant but, as the Ford Zodiacs and Anglias gave way to Escort Mk 2s and Cortinas, and our TV graduated from monochrome to colour, he was promoted to Inspector.

Having played the same role in more than 600 episodes over sixteen years, James Ellis could easily have become encumbered by the Bert Lynch association for the rest of his career, but he was too good for that. In the early Eighties he earned rave reviews as the tough, troubled patriarch Norman Martin in a trilogy of Plays for Today focusing on ‘Billy’, as portrayed by a youthful Kenneth Branagh. I think I saw one but they were a bit heavy for me at that time.

More my cup of tea was a rather cosy nostalgic series about a zoo vet, BBC1’s One By One. Although not the lead, Jimmy Ellis was a regular throughout the three-year run as Paddy Reilly, so no need to disguise his natural accent! His peaked cap sported no police badge, his former slim angular frame had filled out but he was a pleasure to watch as ever.

The early Nineties saw Ellis feature in two comedies. In 1990, he was back in uniform, this time in Nightingales. as a veteran security man called – in another nod back to his Z Cars days - Sarge, I only caught a few episodes, largely because it was on Channel 4 late in the evening, but I could appreciate the rather surreal humour and the quality of Jimmy’s co-stars Robert Lindsay and the thuggish David Threlfall. The span of Nightingales overlapped with one of the last series of In Sickness and in Health, in which Ellis regularly appeared as Michael, frequently engaging in political badinage with Warren Mitchell’s Alf Garnett. By that time, Jonny Speight’s scripts may have lacked the visceral power of Till Death… but the supporting cast was always top drawer, and Jimmy Ellis was as fine as any.

In his seventies he was still in demand. He appeared in the 2002 Christmas special of Only Fools and Horses (the ‘Gary’ episode) but didn’t have much of a part. However, two years later he was an integral character, albeit bedridden in Holby General, in one of Casualty’s periodic dramatic two-parters, but the familiar Belfast accent was sadly absent.

Tragically in real life he outlived both his sons but he was more than a mere thesp. It was only after his death in 2014 that I became aware of Jimmy’s parallel careers as poet and translator from French. He was also extremely popular in his native nation and his name was attached to a prominent bridge in East Belfast. Not many TV or stage actors can command such respect. Give me James Eliis over James Nesbitt any day of the week! 

Doug McClure - the cowboy king

In my early childhood, American TV was everywhere. However, I doubt it had much relevance to American culture in the 1960s.  I Love Lucy? Dick Van Dyke? The Beverly Hillbillies? Bonanza? Oh, come on! As a young boy, one of the few examples I lapped up were Westerns. It’s hardly surprising we were always playing ‘Cowboys and Indians’, probably the last generation of boys to do so.

With home-grown dramas in short supply, cheap films dominated the early evening BBC schedules. Back then, the likes of Alan Ladd, Richard Widmark and Randolph Scott were as

ubiquitous on our screens as Bob Monkhouse, Hughie Green or Dick Emery. However, the show which seemed to herald the start of our weekend was The Virginian.

Before homework began to infiltrate my leisure time on Friday evenings, the family would sit down after our fish and chips, and watch this saga of Shiloh ranch hands and Medicine Bow folk. The stirring Percy Faith theme tune accompanied sequences of cowboys on galloping horses. What’s not to like? James Drury played the eponymous hero but for me the most memorable character was Trampas, played by Doug McClure.

Blonde-haired and square-jawed, it was a surprise the Californian wasn’t a bigger star by the time The Virginian began in 1962. Apparently he had served his apprenticeship in other westerns so knew how to ride. He wasn’t all about shooting scalp-hungry, tomahawk-waving native Americans either, which I particularly appreciated. As I grew older, my allegiance transferred away from the cowboys. Indeed I often stood out from my crowd by supporting the underdog in all manner of circumstances, from Tom in Tom and Jerry to Somerset CCC and Queens Park Rangers. The Virginian may have been set in the late nineteenth century but, like Star Trek, it was quite progressive compared with Sixties USA for whom the Wild West had been transplanted into the Far East and the Vietnam War. The series featured plenty of gunfights but not with the ‘Indians’ with whom Shiloh seemed to operate a policy of respect laced with an inevitable degree of mutual suspicion.

I doubt the political and social nuances registered with this young boy but the adventures of Trampas and his colleagues made for a healthy dose of escapism on a Friday night. McClure stayed with the programme right to the end, surviving even a radical change of format, pace and look for the final series. I could forgive Trampas his new moustache but the pedant in my eleven year-old self took great offence at the absence of capital letters in the titles and cast list. That was – and remains – beyond the pale!

Doug McClure appeared in plenty more American dramas and mini-series, most of them crap, but few made it to our screens. An exception was the engrossing 1977 saga Roots, based on the Alex Haley bestseller, in which Trampas morphed into a nasty piece of work called Jemmy. Consequently I prefer to remember McClure as the more enlightened Virginian character. 

It wasn’t the only Western series I watched. BBC2 broadcast The High Chaparral repeats for years, although it wasn’t one of our regulars. Alias Smith and Jones, on the other hand, was essential viewing. Not so much with all the family but amongst my friends. Indeed it boasted some of the highest audience figures the channel had ever known. The tales of likeable outlaws Hannibal Heyes and ‘Kid’ Curry were more light-hearted than The Virginian and were great fun for a twelve- or thirteen year-old. I think that by the late ‘70s, Westerns had been supplanted by cop shows, so probably the last TV series I watched was The Quest, broadcast in the UK in ‘77.

As for Doug McClure, his tendency to appear in dodgy series and straight-to-video movies has been lampooned in comedies ever since, from Red Dwarf to The Simpsons. As one of the models for the TV character Troy McClure, he lives on in a twilight world of public information films and a sense of perpetual bewilderment. It’s said that the real Doug’s family assured him that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery…..

He may not have been the greatest actor, nor someone who has frequently punctuated my life of viewing. However, McClure represents a part of my childhood when a bike was my prized possession and the fictional cowboy was king.

Trevor Eve - the highest forehead on TV

Apart from classic book fictional characters such as Sherlock Holmes, Poirot and Miss Marple, private detectives on TV have been primarily an American preserve. The Seventies and Eighties were well served by Colombo’s scruffy mac, Harry O’s Austin Healey, Magnum’s moustache, Moonlighting’s dazzling dialogue and Jim Rockford’s Malibu trailer, as featured in my most cherished US show of the era, The Rockford Files.

Our own efforts were very different. Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) was played for laughs, Thames TV’s Frank Marker in Public Eye was much more downbeat, and more recently Cormoran Strike, with his prosthetic leg, currently conducts his business from a run-down office in seedy Soho.  However, my all-time favourite investigator has to be Eddie Shoestring, the role which first introduced me to Trevor Eve.

Shoestring was like no other crime series I’d ever seen. For starters, it was firmly set In and around Bristol, just up the M5 from where I was at the time an undergraduate in Exeter. The primary twist was his character playing not a private eye but the Private Ear, working for a local radio station after suffering a nervous breakdown. Eve’s investigator was no natural action man either. The closest we got to a violent altercation was probably this rough-and-tumble in the Severn Estuary mud! My contemporary diary noted some leaps of faith regarding the resolution of the mysteries but the characters, locations and storylines grabbed me immediately.

Sadly there were only two series spanning a mere fifteen months before Eve quit in order to focus on theatre for a while. The BBC producers filled the gap sharpish with Bergerac but it was a while before the actor featured in anything I watched. Since then he has specialised in roles as haughty characters of dubious morals. With that hooked nose and towering forehead three storeys high, it’s hardly surprising

In 1990 I saw him star in A Sense of Guilt, one of those Andrew Newman bonkbusters so popular in the Eighties. It stirred up the Daily Mail mob as Eve’s Felix Cramer was a middle-aged writer shagging a friend’s teenage daughter who also sparked the green biro brigade into action by having the temerity to appear topless.  Trevor Eve was at it again in ‘94, involved in sexual shenanigans with Charlotte Rampling in Murder In Mind then, a year later, he was an MP who has an affair in The Politician’s Wife. A pattern was emerging…. I didn’t witness his performance in the remake of Andrea Newman’s infamous A Bouquet of Barbed Wire, nor in various TV movies but in 2000 he snared the lead as a senior cop who – shock horror! – was not putting it about with young women. 

If I remember correctly, Waking The Dead began as one of several crime pilot dramas and was to run for nine series. Eve’s Peter Boyd was originally a DCI who led a team investigating unsolved cold case murders, each wrapped up in two episodes screened on consecutive nights. With an excellent supporting cast featuring the likes of Sue Johnston, Holly Aird and Tara Fitzgerald, Boyd was a great character. A decisive man of action, he also on occasion demonstrated a tender side in a team which invariably worked like a well-oiled machine. The snappy dialogue also flowed freely but it was Boyd who held this classy series together.

Trevor Eve was embroiled in another cold case in 2015 but this time as a suspect. Playing a shady politician (surprise, surprise), he was in a superb cast for series one of ITV’s Unforgotten, to which I shall undoubtedly return in a later chapter or two. That same year he was a wealthy businessman fronting a lucrative drugs enterprise in BBC’s so-so eight-parter The Interceptor. Alongside the star OT Fagbenie he was the best thing in it, portraying the evil Roach with a credible level of menace.

He may be 68, precisely ten years older than me – to the day – but I’m sure Trevor will remain in demand. The floppy-haired, tan-jacketed investigation days may be well behind him but there will always be roles for tall, slightly sinister Establishment figures of a certain age. Nobody plays them like he does. 

Underground overground... Bernard Cribbins

Just the other month, we were watching a repeated Christmas edition of ITV’s Celebrity Chase and was delighted to see Bernard Cribbins lined up to face the quiz queen Anne Hegerty. He may have needed a chair for the ‘head-to-head' but, for all his ninety years on this Earth, with droll humour intact, he proved his timeless appeal. He won his chase, too!

Bernard has been a household name throughout my life. His early Sixties top ten comedy singles were staples of radio’s Junior Choice. It’s tragic that an equity release company’s advert has ruined my memory of ‘Right Said Fred’ but there’s still an unblemished ‘Hole in the Ground’ to make me smile.

Then there’s his performance as station porter Perks in that schmaltzfest movie The Railway Children (the only bright spot in what I consider to be an overrated celebration of perfect, privileged childhood). As a young person myself, I also remember seeing him star in Carry On Jack amidst the usual crew, and with Peter Sellers and co in the even earlier comedy Two Way Stretch. On the other hand I was, and still am, puzzled by his appearance in the bizarre Hammer Films adventure She.  His character may have been relatively light-hearted but even at the age of twelve I considered it a strange piece of casting.

But this is a celebration of TV legends, and Mr Cribbins certainly wasn’t restricted to the pop charts or cinema. I suppose he was a late arrival to the gogglebox but to a son of the Sixties like me, he will always be associated with BBC1’s storytelling strand Jackanory. I can’t claim to remember any individual books but, in addition to H.E.Todd’s rendering of his amusing Bobby Brewster adventures and the inimitable Kenneth Williams, it’s Bernard who represents the programme for me. It’s hardly surprising because apparently he holds the record for Jackanory appearances – by a considerable margin. Interpreting anything from Aiken to Blyton, Bilbo to Paddington, he could hold us children spellbound by just sitting in a studio and telling a story; no special effects or fancy camerawork needed. Not in the years when I was a regular viewer anyway.

I failed to find any short clips from my era on YouTube and the same was true of the children’s celebrity acting game show Star Turn. With Catherine I probably watched most of the episodes, which were broadcast between 1976 and 1978. Cribbins was the lively presenter trying to control two teams of familiar faces from children’s TV. It was all very entertaining stuff and, if memory serves, our host would end each programme by chucking his question cards up in the air. You’d never catch Magnus Magnusson doing that on Mastermind!

Although I didn’t necessarily realise it at the time, Bernard was also the king of the voiceover or narration, from Tufty’s Road Safety campaigns to Alice in Wonderland. However, he is probably best remembered as the voice of The Wombles. Unsurprisingly his favourite, like most children’s, was the naughty Orinoco but he brought a sense of irreverence, levity and charm to all of Elisabeth Beresford’s long-nosed litter-pickers. For a while I also believed he sang lead vocals on The Wombles’ hit singles, but in my defence the actual singer-composer, I still think Mike Batt sounds not dissimilar to the TV show narrator. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Throughout the decade Bernard would entertain the City Varieties crowd in The Good Old Days, a show I hated, but he was brilliant as an irritating spoon salesman in the first extraordinary series of Fawlty Towers. Repeats apart, I didn’t see a great deal of him for about three decades until, out of the blue, he turned up in one of the most popular series of the late Noughties: Doctor Who.

Playing Wilfred Mott, the world-weary grandfather of Catherine Tate, he immediately provided a different perspective on the everyday dilemmas of a Time Lord on Earth. You know: alien invasions, the end of time, that sort of thing. Yet for a renowned comedy actor, Wilfred was no comic relief. When he wasn’t doing his bit shooting at Daleks he was engaging in philosophical conversations with David Tennant’s Doctor. This wasn’t kids’ sci-fi nonsense; it was dramatic acting of the highest order. Yet I was telling myself that, despite his eyes looking sadder and rheumier, this was really THE Bernard Cribbins!

Bernard may have been approaching eighty but Doctor Who won him new fans and revived his lengthy career. With a mind undimmed by age he became in great demand for comedy panel shows. I missed his Never Mind The Buzzcocks appearance (a Dr Who special, of course) but his career came full circle on Have I Got News For You?  when ‘Hole In the Ground’ formed the basis of an ‘Odd One Out’ round when teamed with Paul Merton. Pointless Celebrities was next, which brings us back to where I started, with The Chase. Mr Cribbins may not have left with wads of cash for his charity but his legendary status was most definitely enhanced.