One of the lads
Actor who made his mark playing Bob Ferris in the BBC’S hugely popular sitcom The Likely Lads
Rodney Bewes, right, the actor best known for his role alongside James Bolam on the classic Sixties sitcom The Likely Lads, and its Seventies sequel Whatever Happened to The Likely Lads? has died at the age of 79. “Rodney was a true one-off,” said Michelle Braidman, his agent.
RODNEY BEWES, who has died aged 79, never quite managed to lay the ghost of the character that made him famous on television in the mid-1960s, that of Bob Ferris, the chirpy but browbeaten half of The Likely Lads, one of the most popular BBC sitcoms of the day.
Funny, touching and well-acted, the original series – about two workingclass friends making their way in Newcastle – ended in 1966. Although it returned in a catch-up form in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? in 1973, it was, to all intents and purposes, Bewes’s last hurrah as a regular television face. For the last 40 years of his career, he mainly made his living on the London and provincial stage, and latterly toured draughty village halls with a one-man version of Three Men in a Boat.
But he remained defiant. “People think one’s become a failure if one’s not in television,” he told an interviewer in 1995. “I would put in answer to that that I’m so thrilled I haven’t been in rubbish.”
When The Likely Lads ended after 21 episodes, both Bewes and his co-star James Bolam set their eyes on successful film careers, but while Bolam did move into serious acting, in films, television and on the stage, Bewes’s career was already stalling. A promising blip occurred when a bout of flu landed him in bed, and he hit on the idea for another sitcom called Dear Mother … Love Albert, which ran on ITV between 1969 and 1973.
With his air of aggrieved, moonfaced innocence, Bewes cast himself as the hero, a north-country hick writing fanciful weekly letters home to his mother telling her how well he was doing in London, while in reality he was struggling to cope. (The scenario echoed his real-life foray to the capital as a budding teenage actor in the early 1950s.) Although some critics found it corny, the series did well, reaching No 7 in the ratings, but when the writers of The Likely Lads, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, floated the idea of reviving the original show in 1973, Bewes was unable to resist – a decision that signalled the demise of Dear Mother …
By then Bewes’s brainchild had brought him the trappings of success – expensive cars including a Bentley were his particular weakness – but the television rollercoaster soon came to a halt. He did resurface as Mr Rodney, Basil Brush’s sidekick on children’s television, in 1968, but by the 1980s, when Bewes arrived at the BBC to pitch his latest idea for a sitcom, where the Bentley had been waved into the VIP car park at Television Centre, the pushbike on which he now reported was directed round the back, where Bewes was obliged to chain it to some scaffolding.
Other low points included appearances in training films for British Telecom, and, in 1982, his appointment as spokesman for the now defunct trade organisation the British Onion Marketing Board.
But there were highlights, too. In 1970 he appeared in the film Spring and Port Wine, starring James Mason, and in 1972 played the Knave of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Further film work followed, in Jabberwocky (1977), The Spaceman and King Arthur (1979) and The Wildcats of St Trinian’s (1980), but after appearing in the 1984 Doctor Who serial “Resurrection of the Daleks”, Bewes’s television career largely petered out.
Some of his career misfires were of other people’s making. While starring in a West End production of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None in 1987, Bewes began receiving calls from a woman admirer who became infatuated with him. She moved house to be closer to his, sent him flowers, champagne and Harrods hampers. Eventually she was convicted of embezzling £65,000 that she had lavished on Bewes, money she had defrauded from banks and building societies.
In a pile of her unpaid bills, police found a photograph Bewes had unwisely sent her, showing him stark naked except for a polo mallet. “I’ve always had a strange effect on a certain type of woman,” he explained. “It’s the eyes I suppose, and I’ve got a good body because I row all the time. It keeps me in shape.”
Indeed, although still mildly asthmatic, Bewes followed a vigorous keep-fit regime, and was a familiar figure in his single sculls boat on the River Thames, rowing between Putney and Kew. In the early 1990s he went on to devise a one-man show based on Jerome K Jerome’s comic account of a Thames boating holiday Three Men in a Boat (1889), performing it at Henley-on-thames while living there aboard a renovated Edwardian skiff he rescued from a skip.
Rodney Bewes was born on November 27 1937 at Bingley, outside Bradford, West Yorkshire, where his father was a clerk in an electricity showroom; his mother taught mentally handicapped children. Until he was 12 he was bedridden with chronic asthma, and although he was kept off school, and could never spell, even in adulthood, he read Dickens and Greek literature voraciously.
In 1949 he read in his socialist father’s Daily Herald that the BBC were looking for child actors to appear on Children’s Hour television plays. He applied, was called to London to an audition, was duly cast, and found that although his asthma did not vanish, it did improve dramatically.
At 15 he was awarded a place at Rada’s prep school in Highgate, learning school lessons in the mornings and attending acting classes after lunch. His solitary existence, carefully chronicled in letters home to his mother, was almost Dickensian: he lived alone in a basement flat in Hampstead, and worked three or four nights a week in the kitchens of the Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane, finishing at 6am before walking back to Highgate where he would scrub tables at the Rada school and peel vegetables for lunch before beginning his lessons.
He joined the RAF for National Service in September 1955 and trained as a telephonist and teleprinter operator. For six months he served at the RAF Regiment Light Anti-aircraft Gunnery School before moving to the RAF airfield on the island of Sylt off the coast of Schleswig-holstein. He was discharged as a senior aircraftman in October 1957.
After his National Service, Bewes progressed to Rada proper, only to be sacked after two terms – “We think his
talents better channelled into another profession” – and while his mother was distressed, Bewes took the setback in his stride. “After all, Alec Guinness was booted out of Rada, too,” he noted. After Bewes’s mother herself intervened, Rada relented.
In 1963 Bewes was cast in the film of
Billy Liar (he had shared a flat with the film’s star Tom Courtenay); a year earlier, James Bolam had appeared with Courtenay in another northern working-class drama, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Both films caught the attention of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, who were looking for two unknowns to star in what became The Likely Lads.
Bewes was later vexed with his former co-star James Bolam, who refused to give the BBC permission to show repeats of The Likely Lads. He believed Bolam considered the series too lightweight for his image as a serious actor.
Bewes continued to tour Britain with his solo Three Men in a Boat,
which in 1997 won the Stella Artois prize at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In between his travels he would break off to fulfil West End and other theatre dates, and in 1996 starred with Henry Mcgee in a revival of Neil Simon’s comedy The Odd Couple (Theatre Royal, Drury Lane).
He was a freeman of the Company of Watermen and Lightermen, and a member of the Garrick. His autobiography, A Likely Story, appeared in 2005.
After a very brief first marriage Rodney Bewes married secondly, in 1973, Daphne Black, a buyer for Biba; she died in 2015. He is survived by their daughter and triplet sons.