Presenter of Play School who gave a voice to Trumpton
For millions of people who Brian
grew up in the 1960s and Cant
1970s, Brian Cant evoked 1933-2017
childhood. He was, for 21 years, the host of Play School, with its resident cast of stuffed toys (Big Ted, Little Ted, Humpty, Jemima and Hamble) and its round windows and square windows that whisked children off to a bottling plant, or a biscuit factory. He also provided the narration and all the voices for the much-loved stop-motion animation Camberwick Green. “Here is a box, a musical box, wound up and ready to play,” Cant told viewers, at the start of each episode. “But this box can hide a secret inside. Can you guess what is in it today?” Perhaps more famous, however, was his roll call for the fire station, in the sister show Trumpton: “Pugh, Pugh, Barney Mcgrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grub.”
Born in Ipswich in 1933, and educated at Northgate Grammar School, Cant trained as a printer, before deciding to try his hand at acting. After several years in rep, he was working on a drama project for BBC Schools when he heard that they were looking for presenters for a new children’s show on the soonto-be launched BBC Two. At his audition, he was asked to climb into a box and pretend to be rowing out to sea. He did that; then he cast out an imaginary line, and caught a welly boot full of custard. He started work on Play School in 1964, and stayed until 1985. He joined Play Away, for older children, in 1971, where his co-presenters included Jeremy Irons.
Cant’s measured, gently humorous tones were integral to the success of the Trumptonshire shows – but he never saw the puppets whose adventures he recounted: he recorded all his lines in a cupboard that doubled up as a studio, often doing three episodes a day. When his work on children’s TV began to dry up in the mid-1980s (producers having deemed him too old for it), he returned to acting, mainly on stage. He was given a special award at the Children’s Baftas in 2010. Asked what he hoped children would remember of his work, he said: “That I made them laugh, made them feel happy.” Twice married, with five children, Cant had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease since 1999.