Michael Medwin
Actor and producer
WHEN TELEVISION sitcoms were performed live in London theatres, the actor and producer Michael Medwin, who has died at 96, was one of the star names.
Medwin achieved national fame in Granada’s The Army Game as the spivvish Corporal Springer, who presided over Alfie Bass’s Private “Excused Boots” Bisley and the other misfit National Service conscripts in
Hut 29 of the Surplus Ordnance Department at Nether Hopping.
The series was so popular in the second half of the 1950s that it spawned two feature films – an official one retitled I Only Arsked, and another with a few of the cast members in different roles. That was Carry On Sergeant, from which an entire franchise sprang. Medwin and his co-stars even had a hit single with the show’s theme tune.
Although produced by ITV’s Northern franchisee, the show was broadcast live from Granada’s Chelsea Palace Theatre. No fewer than 154 episodes were turned out within four years, and a spin-off followed.
It was not Medwin’s first role nor his last.
He went on to play the radio station owner Don Satchley in the BBC’s 1979 West Country crime series, Shoestring, opposite Trevor Eve, and was in films with Michael Caine, Sean Connery and Albert Finney.
Alongside Finney, he also produced the Lindsay Anderson films If..., O Lucky Man and Charlie Bubbles.
He was made an OBE for services to drama in 2005.
Born in London in 1923, Medwin trained at the Italia Conti stage school in the capital and made his film debut as a radio operator in 1946’s Piccadilly Incident, one of the “London films” directed by Herbert Wilcox and starring his wife, Anna Neagle.
He went on to appear in A Hill in Korea, Doctor at Large, Carry On Nurse and The Longest Day.
In the 1983 James Bond romp, Never Say Never Again, in which Connery reappeared as the title character, he played the doctor who treated 007.
Medwin also played the nephew of Albert Finney’s title character in Scrooge, despite being 12 years Finney’s senior. He made one of his final screen appearances in 2008 in the Keira Knightley film, The Duchess.
As a stage producer, his work included Spring and Port Wine, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and Another Country. He remained chairman of David Pugh Limited, a West End and Broadway production company, until his death. He married Sunny Sheila Back in 1960; they divorced in 1971.