Stuart Fell - Fire Eater and Fall Guy

I love cast lists. And TV credits. They’re a source of weird and wonderful detail – or at least they were.  With listings magazines and newspapers concentrating only on the lead actor or presenter, and on-screen credits ritually condensed into a tiny corner so small as to be illegible to make way for obscure helplines and promotions for shows I’ll never watch, my viewing enjoyment has been diminished in recent years. Besides putting names to faces and identifying vaguely familiar film locations, such records have over the years introduced me to all sorts of production roles and the people who fill them. 

Most are men and women whose skills contribute so much to the quality of a production, from sound and lighting to the runner and best boy and ‘rostrum camera’ (it was always Ken Morse). Many dramas seem to rely on fight arrangers or stunt co-ordinators and one of the best known in the Seventies and Eighties was Stuart Fell. He cropped up so often that Catherine and I would exclaim with delight every time he appeared.

Later on, Tip Tipping began to rival Stuart for ubiquity. I could even venture a weak joke about stunts involving Tip Tipping but only Stuart Fell. Hmm, pretty poor. Don’t go into comedy, Mike! Of course accidents are an occupational hazard in this line of work and tragically, aged only 34, TT died while filming a documentary. This was roughly the same time that Stuart also retired from such dangerous pursuits, although he was well into his fifties.

Uniquely for one of my TV Treasures, Stuart Fell is a legend whose face I would never recognise. Not only is he not a household name but even in his prime he could have knocked on our door and be greeted by a brusque “Not today, thank you”. This was largely because his work as a stunt double obviously depends on anonymity. Whether reversing Ronnie Corbett’s car into a gazebo, somersaulting over a hedge in Compo’s woolly hat and scruffy jacket or leaping from the path of a careering charabanc driven by The Master, if you couldn’t see the victim’s face clearly, if at all, it was probably Stuart Fell.

For example, I would have seen him dressed as Michael Palin tumbling through the banisters in the bloody climax to a 1977 Ripping Yarns tale, and in all likelihood emerging from and jumping into a river during a 1981 Last of the Summer Wine. So accident-prone were Compo and his mates that the latter series must have provided Stuart with regular pay cheques over the years. Some of his stunts didn’t actually involve him appearing on screen. As adviser or arranger, it was his job to ensure that a scene could look horrendously dangerous without unduly imperilling anyone else. Perhaps the most famous is the literal cliffhanger on Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em when Frank Spencer’s Morris was left dangling above a genuinely sheer drop. On that occasion it was Michael Crawford hanging from a specially reinforced exhaust pipe but it was Fell’s skills and preparation that ensured the star didn’t come a cropper.

He was also a regular on Doctor Who. Back in ’71 he was flinging himself theatrically to the ground in Jon Pertwee’s cape and Roger Delgado’s beard and he was to pop up as all sorts of monsters such as Cybermen, Sea Devils and Ice Warriors. What marked out Stuart Fell from other stunt/fight arrangers was that he was also frequently in the actual cast. He made regular appearances in the nether regions of credits as an actor, albeit one with few, if any lines and nary a close-up. Again in Doctor Who in a couple of stories he waggled claws and blinked a giant eye as the visually striking alien Alpha Centauri and in 1978 he enjoyed a healthy dose of screen time as a Sontaran leader albeit with only his eyes showing.

A few years later he was again encased in a helmet, this time as a motorcyclist incurring Ronnie Barker’s irritation in Open All Hours. However, many of his appearances were very minor, which made his credited appearances more notable. After all we would never have recognised fleeting shots of his Man in Toilet, Nazi Guard, or Bloke Somewhere In The Background Of A Dick Emery Sketch!

Another of his talents was as an old-school physical entertainer. In an episode of The Prince and the Pauper (1976), he hogged the screen for a whole minute as an acrobat, juggler and fire-eater, eliciting the admiration not only of us viewers but also, apparently, the 14 year-old star Nicholas Lyndhurst. He was also a blink-and-you-miss-it fire-eater in Poldark the following year. 

Whether as an alien soldier, back-to-the-camera stuntman or humble extra, Stuart Fell seemed to generate a peculiar aura in our household, accentuated by his perennial inconspicuousness. We usually never realised he had appeared until we saw his name in those all-important credits. Unfortunately I doubt we’ll ever see – or read – his like again.