Brian Cant
Actor and children’s television presenter who narrated the Trumptonshire series from a cupboard
BRIAN CANT, who has died aged 83, was the presenter of several long-running television series from the so-called “Golden Age” of children’s television including Play School and Play Away. Cant’s clear diction, easy manner and infectious sense of fun made him an obvious choice for the role he played in entertaining millions of children in Britain between the 1960s and 1980s. But it was his ambition to be a serious actor which led him to the programmes for which he is best remembered – an ambition he went some way to fulfilling in the second wind of his career.
Brian John Cant was born at Ipswich on July 12 1933, the son of an engineer. After school, he worked as an apprentice lithographer at a printing press in the town. Although shyness prevented him from acting at school, he developed an interest in local theatre brought about by his errant grandfather, who had performed a roller-skating act in East Anglian music halls before disappearing to Australia with a young woman when Cant was a young child.
While growing up, Cant spent family holidays watching seaside shows at Felixstowe and Clacton and enjoyed listening to music hall stars such as Max Miller performing at the local Hippodrome, until he volunteered as a stage hand at the Ipswich Theatre. Eventually, he was offered small parts in amateur productions at other theatres in and around Ipswich and by his early twenties felt he had learnt enough to try his luck elsewhere.
In 1957 he moved to London. There he continued working in printing by day and acting at night, mainly with the amateur Mount View Theatre Club, which put on about 20 plays each year. After an agent spotted him in one production he was offered a summer season with the Penguin Players, a repertory company based in Peterborough.
Convinced that this would be the only professional acting job he would get, Cant immediately gave up work as a lithographer, reducing his weekly income of £7 10s by two thirds in the process. In the event, he stayed with the Penguins for the next two years.
Having built up enough experience in rep as a Penguin Player, Cant moved on to work for other, bigger companies. In 1960 a friend, Dennis “Slim” Ramsden, introduced him to a BBC television director who agreed to give Cant an audition. He was successful and was cast in a six-part military series. This led to further small roles in a number of other television shows, notably Z Cars, Dixon of Dock Green, Doctor Who and The Saint.
Shortly before BBC Two was launched in April 1964, Cant was working with the producer Cynthia Felgate on a school’s drama. She had been asked to devise a daytime programme for the under-fives for the new channel, which she had provisionally titled Play School, and she was looking for presenters.
Having played to hundreds of children’s audiences from his days in rep, Cant asked for an audition. Although he was not a trained singer, he was quickly offered a job. Play
School was an instant success, and its mixture of puppets, animals, songs, nursery rhymes, storytelling and basic education remained a staple of the BBC schedule for almost a quarter of a century.
In his capacity as the longest-serving member of the presenting team, Cant was integral to the programme’s charm. However, after some 20 years of teaching children the difference between the big hand and the little hand on a clock face, it was decided that Cant was too old for the job and he was, contentiously, dropped.
During his time on Play School Cant cemented his reputation as a children’s presenter with two other popular programmes. The first of these was the Trumptonshire series, created by Gordon Murray and Freddie Phillips and part of the BBC’S Watch with Mother strand.
Set in the fictional county of Trumptonshire were the market towns and villages of Camberwick Green (1966), Trumpton (1967) and Chigley (1969). Cant narrated each part and sang every song in the 39 films of the series, which told the gentle stories of everyday events in the lives of the communities’ postman, doctor, farmer, milkman, lord of the manor and so on.
Cant’s opening words from Trumpton, which were addressed to that town’s firemen – “Pugh, Pugh, Barney Mcgrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grub!” – remain familiar to many who watched the programme, but the experience of working on it was quite different, as Cant later recalled.
“I never saw the puppets or the filming of any of the shows,” he said. “I used to go round to Freddie Phillips’s house and sit in his cupboard, which was also his recording studio. I would do roughly three shows a day in there. It was tiring work.”
Cant’s other big success came from Play Away, a live entertainment spin-off of Play School for older children, incorporating comedy songs and jokes. It ran between 1971 and 1984 and Cant was a presenter throughout. Jeremy Irons also presented the show with Cant during its early years.
By the mid-1980s Cant’s presenting work for the BBC had all but dried up. Although he struggled to shrug off typecasting as a children’s presenter, he eventually resurrected his earlier stage career and performed regularly in regional theatre and pantomime, and occasionally in television drama. His last such role was in 2011, in the BBC daytime series Doctors.
He wrote and narrated further children’s television series, including Mousetown and Animal Families, and also appeared in the Channel Five programme Dappledown Farm.
He worked as a voice-over artist on television commercials, particularly from the mid-1990s, as certain products were cashing in on the children’s nostalgia boom of the time. This pleased him immensely, and it amused him to think that those whom he had entertained years before were now in a position to offer him jobs.
When it came to modern children’s television, Cant seemed unimpressed. “Technically it’s evolved beyond all recognition, which can only be for the better,” he said. “I think people are scared to do anything gentle, though … there seem very few programmes that actually talk to you and give you something interesting to look at. Presenters don’t seem to be able to stand still any more … not being able to stand still was always a sign of an amateur on stage”.
In 2010 he was given a Special Award at the Children’s Baftas.
Brian Cant was twice married. He is survived by his second wife Cherry (née Britton), a former production assistant on Play Away, as well as their son and two daughters and two sons from his first marriage.