TRIBUTES TO ‘ONE OF A KIND’
Stars from entertainment world honour Keith Barron
TO A generation of viewers, he was the languid and slightly louche lounge lizard in a Spanish hotel, wine glass in one hand and a woman in the other.
But Keith Barron, who died yesterday at 83, was also at the vanguard of a new age of attractive yet intellectual leading men who in the 1960s helped expand the boundaries of drama on television.
As the star of Dennis Potter’s 1965 double bill of plays about Nigel Barton, a miner’s son going up to Oxford and finding himself torn between two worlds, he epitomised a new wave of working class hero.
A native of a mining town himself, Mexborough in South Yorkshire, it was a role to which Barron was well suited.
But it is for the 1980s Yorkshire TV package holiday comedy Duty
Free that he was most instantly recognisable.
The series was one of the very few to displace Coronation Street from the top spot on the TV ratings, and fooled many viewers into believing that a TV studio on Kirkstall Road in Leeds was actually on the Costa del Sol.
Gwen Taylor, who played Barron’s occasionally spiteful wife, Amy, in the series, said his death was “quite a blow”.
She added: “Keith was such a kind and lovely man and don’t think I’ve met anyone that would disagree.
“My thoughts and prayers go to his wife Mary and his son Jamie who meant so much to him.”
Three years ago, she was reunited with him and other cast members in a stage version of
Duty Free, which had originally spanned three series between 1984 and 1986.
He would return to Yorkshire TV to star in two more comedies, a period piece called Haggard, and a satire on the television business, Room at the Bottom, opposite James Bolam.
Barron had turned to acting after rejecting a job in the family’s wholesale food business in Mexborough – though he did later return to catering, opening a restaurant in Cornwall.
He trained at Sheffield Playhouse, where he met his wife, Mary Pickard, and went on to work in repertory theatre and the West End.
He made his TV debut on ABC’s The Avengers in 1961, but it was Potter’s plays Stand Up, Nigel Barton and Vote, Vote, Vote
for Nigel Barton that sealed his success.
He went on to star in several films, The Land That Time Forgot and Voyage Of The Damned among them, but it was the small screen that fitted him best, and he continued to be active into his eighties.
“If I’m out of work, I’m terrible. I’m no good to anyone,” he said in 2003. “If I go out, I’m all the time wondering whether the phone’s rung while I’ve been out.
“And if I sit in waiting for it to ring, I’m like a bear with a sore head wondering why it hasn’t.
“You take nothing for granted. And the best thing about it is being offered another job. It keeps the whole thing alive.”.
One of his most recent such jobs was as the father of Stephen Tompkinson’s detective, DCI Banks on ITV. He also popped up
on Benidorm, which, unlike Duty Free, was filmed in Spain, and, in 2007, on the programme his old comedy had briefly toppled, Coronation Street.
Keith was such a kind and lovely man. No-one would disagree. Actress Gwen Taylor, who co-starred with Keith Barron in the Duty Free television series.