Rainbow presenter Geoffrey Hayes, 76, dies
Actor who was for two decades a cherished fixture of children’s television as presenter of Rainbow
Geoffrey Hayes, who hosted the children’s programme
Rainbow, has died at the age of 76.
Phil Dale, the actor and television presenter’s manager, said in a statement: “It is with great sadness that the family announce that Geoffrey passed away from pneumonia in hospital with his wife, Sarah, and son, Tom, by his side.”
Hayes appeared alongside puppets Zippy, George and Bungle in more than 1,000 episodes of the show.
GEOFFREY HAYES, the actor, who has died aged 76, presented the young children’s television favourite Rainbow for nearly 20 years, but his career never recovered from the show being abruptly dropped in 1992, after which he struggled to find work, stacking shelves in a supermarket and driving a minicab.
Launched by ITV in 1972, Rainbow was designed as Britain’s answer to the American Sesame Street, which the British educational establishment complained was largely aimed at deprived children in inner-city New York. With Rainbow the idea was to educate and entertain British underfives with words, songs and ideas.
Inside the Rainbow house, Hayes in brightly coloured dungarees (until they went out of fashion) kept order amid a menagerie comprising a domineering, hyperactive puppet, Zippy, a clumsy bear, Bungle, and a pink hippopotamus called George, all of whom he struggled to control with impressive gusto. For much of the show’s life Roy Skelton provided Zippy’s harsh and hectoring voice as well as George’s gentle and introverted tones: Skelton was also known for playing various Cybermen and Daleks in Doctor Who.
Hayes’s role was that of a kindly but long-suffering mentor, although his precise relationship to Zippy, George and Bungle was unclear, and there were hints that there may have been a gay subtext, although this was never substantiated.
One of the musicians in the studio was Matthew Corbett, who went on to take over the television puppet Sooty from his father, Harry. The Rainbow series came to an abrupt end when Thames Television handed its ITV franchise over to Carlton Television on New Year’s Eve 1992.
Hayes was shocked, and claimed to have heard the news of his “sacking” from the tabloids. A couple of subsequent revivals, not involving him, were short-lived. A Rainbow sketch for the Thames Television staff Christmas tape in 1979, known as the “Twangers” episode and featuring much sexual innuendo, was never broadcast but has since become an internet phenomenon with more than a million hits.
Geoffrey Hayes was born on March 13 1942 in Stockport, Cheshire. His early acting career was confined to the repertory theatre, but he also tried his hand at writing, his credits including The Great Pony Raid (1968), a drama made by the Children’s Film Foundation about horse rustling on Dartmoor.
As an actor he was fortunate on two occasions to find himself in the right place at the right time. In the early 1970s he read for a part in an episode of Z Cars when the producer asked if he would be interested in playing a new police character, a small role at first but one they intended to build on. At that stage the character had no name, only later becoming DC Scatliff. Hayes passed the audition and the part became a recurring one.
During the weeks when Scatliff did not appear, however, Hayes was forced to look for other work. He was living in a maisonette in Hampstead and appearing in Harriet’s Back in Town, a daytime soap opera at Thames Television, when he bumped into an actor he had worked with in repertory in Dundee, David Cook, who was presenting a children’s programme Hayes had never heard of called Rainbow. When Cook told him he was leaving the show, Hayes knocked on the producer’s door, asked if he could audition, and got the job.
So enthusiastic was Hayes that he would go in on days off to rehearse. Because Rainbow was a programme aimed at pre-school children, his wages were kept at the lower end of the pay scale, but the show furnished him with a regular income for 20 years.
It became something of a cult and Hayes received bookings – along with Bungle, George and Zippy – for live appearances at nightclubs and university gigs. But when the series was wound up and he began looking for serious acting work, he found himself typecast, with directors only thinking of him as Rainbow’s childlike Geoffrey.
He moped at home until his wife told him to do something to take his mind off his plight, and for four months he worked two nights a week shelf-stacking at his local Sainsbury’s and did a stint driving a taxi. He also starred in a television commercial for Virgin Money promoting savings accounts, making light of his fall from stardom, and appeared in the all-star line-up for the video of Peter Kay’s fundraising re-release of Tony Christie’s Is This the Way to Amarillo?
In 2002 Hayes relaunched himself at the Edinburgh Fringe with a one-man show called Over the Rainbow. “Buoyancy rather than bitterness is the hallmark,” reported the Telegraph critic, “with Hayes leaping around in yellow dungarees, shedding 30 years as he goes, offering nonsensical conspiracy theories about Rainbow’s demise and silly stories about Bungle, Zippy and George.” Hayes, however, never divulged the untold inside story of the programme.
His wife and son survive him.
Geoffrey Hayes, born March 13 1942, death announced October 1 2018