Derek Fowlds
Actor who found fame alongside Basil Brush and went on to co-star in Yes Minister and Heartbeat
DEREK FOWLDS, who has died aged 82, was a classically trained actor but owed his celebrity to three television roles, as Basil Brush’s sidekick, Mr Derek, the principal private secretary Bernard Woolley in
Yes Minister and Oscar Blaketon, the curmudgeonly police sergeant in Heartbeat.
Having played Hamlet in Exeter in 1969, he inherited the mantle of straight man to the puppet fox Basil Brush from the actor Rodney Bewes the same year. On The Basil Brush Show each Saturday teatime Fowlds was required to read a story to the boisterous creature, whose gap‑toothed grin, caddishly refined voice redolent of Terry‑thomas, and repeated interjections of his “Boom‑boom!” catchphrase made him a favourite with children and adults alike.
Fowlds himself had early misgivings. “The first few weeks were terrible,” he recalled. “I felt ridiculous. All I could think was ‘I’ve been a straight actor for 10 years, what are people going to think?’” In the event, his fee of £125 a show persuaded him to stay for four years.
Although he had no work offers for nine months thereafter, Fowlds did go on to more demanding roles in television dramas, among them Edward the Seventh, the ill‑fated Triangle, Boon and Chancer, as well as comedies like After That, This and Robin’s Nest. But it was only in, 1980 when he was cast as the genial civil servant Bernard Woolley in Yes Minister, that his television career fully blossomed.
As principal private secretary to the Minister for Administrative Affairs, Fowlds’s character hovered between those of his political master Jim Hacker (Paul Eddington) and his Civil Service boss Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne).
It was Fowlds, as Bernard, who would nervously offer opinions on the ramifications of Hacker’s famously indecisive decision‑ making. The series ran for two years, returning in 1986 as Yes, Prime Minister (with Hacker installed in Downing Street and Bernard still at his side).
Fowlds was a bemused witness to the behind‑the‑scenes power play between Eddington and Hawthorne. Before his death in 2001, Hawthorne said he felt that Eddington considered himself the best actor of the three and that he and Fowlds were “not quite up to it”. Certainly, Fowlds accepted that Eddington could assume a superior air.
“Paul would say to me: ‘This is a masterclass in acting for you, Derek’,” said Fowlds, whose memoir A Part Worth Playing was published in 2015.
Fowlds was back on the small screen in 1992 cast as the grouchy Sgt Oscar Blaketon in ITV’S popular police drama Heartbeat. Set on the North Yorkshire moors, it was a gently nostalgic invocation of 1960s rural life centred around a village pub and the local police station, where Blaketon kept a fatherly eye on young coppers like PC Rowan (Nick Berry). When the character retired from the police, he ran the local post office before taking over as landlord of the pub.
Fowlds based the character on a drill corporal he had known while serving in the RAF. He remained with the series for its entire run, which ended in 2009.
The son of a salesman who died when he was four, Derek James Fowlds was born on September 2 1937 in Balham, south‑west London, and after failing his 11‑ plus attended Ashlyns Secondary Modern School in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, where he took an interest in the theatre and acted in amateur productions.
Having left school at 15 to join a printing firm as an apprentice compositor, he was called up for National Service in the RAF, and while stationed on Malta continued to act. After winning a scholarship to Rada in 1958, Fowlds made his professional debut on the West End stage in The Miracle Worker (Royalty, 1961). In 1975 he was one of three Macbeths (with Alfred Lynch and James Bolam) in Frank Dunlop’s production of the Scottish play at the Young Vic.
He appeared in various films, including Doctor in Distress (1963) with Dirk Bogarde, East of Sudan (1964), Hotel Paradiso (1966) with Alec Guinness, Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) and The Smashing Bird I Used to Know (1969), before finding fame with Basil Brush. His four‑year tenure as the puppet fox’s stooge included three Royal Command performances.
He featured in more sinister television roles in the ITV political thriller Rules of Engagement (1989) and, the following year, as an MI5 man in the BBC’S Die Kinder.
Derek Fowlds married, in 1964, Wendy Tory, daughter of the diplomat Sir Geofroy Tory, with whom he had two sons. The marriage was dissolved and in 1974 he married the dancer and Blue Peter presenter Lesley Judd. When this marriage failed after a year, he began a relationship with Jo Lyndsey; she died in 2012, and he is survived by his two children, one of whom, Jeremy, followed his father into acting.