Gravelly voice of BBC radio legend
Edward Kelsey actor b June 4, 1930 d April 23, 2019
Actor Edward Kelsey, who has died aged 88, was best loved for the 34 years he spent playing Joe Grundy in the long-running BBC radio show The Archers.
Grundy made an enormous contribution to the life of the fictional village of Ambridge, from his legendary cider club to his adored ferrets and beady eye for a sneaky scheme, such as selling fresh ‘‘spring water’’ that he had bottled himself.
‘‘I don’t think he was ever wicked, he was just after the main chance,’’ Kelsey said of his character, and fans of The Archers will remember him as a loveable rogue.
Officially born in 1921, the character of Joe is a decade older than the actor who played him, but Joe often talked as if he were as old as Methuselah – and sometimes he had the wisdom to match it. Kelsey played Joe with warmth, wisdom, humour and a fondness for a bit of a moan: the apparently terrible affliction of Joe’s ‘‘farmer’s lung’’ was the cause of much misery, despite some Ambridge residents’ suspicions about how real his suffering was.
Kelsey’s performance was, throughout those 34 years, one of the best on radio.
Joe’s voice is instantly recognisable in any Archers scene. His gravelly, rolling Borsetshire vowels made Borsetshire feel like a place that actually might exist with its own distinctive twang.
His voice was textured and coloured with growls and lilts, perfectly suited to a man who seemed to have grown out of the very earth around Ambridge. Most remarkably of all, Kelsey managed, through sound alone, to convey the sense of a character with a twinkle in his eye.
‘‘We are the rude mechanicals . . . we come in and lighten things up,’’ Kelsey said of the Grundy family in a BBC interview to mark 60 years of The Archers. Certainly the Grundys have provided plenty of comic relief, but the family have had their pathos too, and Joe was their central pillar and emotional heart.
The saddest time in Joe’s life was being evicted from Grange Farm, where he had been the tenant farmer, after the Grundys got into debt. He was rehoused at a soulless modern development in Borchester, and deprived of his home and way of life as a farmer; it forced him to a gruesome disposal of his ferrets and a long dark night of the soul.
Fans will feel it’s only right that, in recent years, he returned to Grange Farm and Ambridge, where he belonged. Now he won’t ever have to leave again.
Alongside his performance at the heart of Britain’s longest-running soap, Kelsey had a rich cultural career. He considered going into medicine or journalism before settling on acting, and he played a variety of radio drama and stage roles before taking over the role of Joe Grundy from his friend, the late Haydn Jones.
Kelsey also appeared on TV in Dangermouse and The Vicar of Dibley ,in three Dr Who stories, and in the 2015 animated film Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
He was born in Hampshire, southern England, and went to medical school, but soon decided to swap medicine for the arts, training at the Royal Academy of Music.
He had been sounding a little frail in recent radio appearances, and listeners had been speculating over whether Joe might be nearing his final days. The BBC has confirmed that Kelsey recorded his last scenes earlier this month.
When listeners hear Joe’s last words, it will be the end of an era in Ambridge. We will raise a glass of cider in his memory. – Telegraph Group