Bobby Knutt
Comic and actor who played a lovable rogue in Benidorm
BOBBY KNUTT, the comedian and actor, who has died on holiday in France aged 71, spent many years treading the boards in Sheffield and became a regular on the northern club and pantomime circuit before finding national fame on television, his roles including jailbird and serial offender Albert Dingle in Emmerdale (ITV, 1995-1998 and 2004), and Eddie Dawson, the mischievous “Grandad” on the ITV comedy series Benidorm (2016-17).
Knutt’s Sheffield vowels were much sought after by advertisers seeking to invest their products with Yorkshire credibility. He replaced Brain Glover as the voice of the jovial “Gaffer” on the long-running Tetley Tea Folk animated television ads, and even confessed to collecting ceramic models of the characters.
“Knutty”, as he was known to his friends, was born Robert Wass in Sheffield on November 25 1945 and educated at Abbeydale Grammar School, where, aged 16, he began to perform as a singer in a group called Bob Andrews and the Questors, later transferring to another group, the Whirlwinds. In 1964, with his friend Geoff Morton, he formed a comedy double act called Pee & Knutt. The following year he launched a solo career as Bobby Knutt, becoming one of the country’s youngest professional stand-up comedians.
As well as touring pubs and clubs, he appeared nationally on the Granada Television shows The Comedians and The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club and worked with names such as Tommy Cooper, Roy Castle and Bob Monkhouse.
His breakthrough into mainstream acting came in 1977 when he was given a starring role in The Price of Coal, a two-part BBC television drama directed by Ken Loach, in which he played the miner’s leader at the fictional Milton colliery, debating the rights and wrongs of management plans to spend money on prettifying the place in preparation for a visit by the Prince of Wales.
He went on to take mainly small parts in television comedies and dramas including Last of the Summer Wine, Heartbeat, Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, All Creatures Great and Small, Our Friends in the North, and Coronation Street (as garage proprietor Ron Sykes).
He first appeared in pantomime in the 1979-80 season at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, as Simple Simon in Mother Goose, where he was given the catchphrase “Eyup Kids!” to get the audience shouting back: “Eyup Knutty!” It proved a great success and he used it in some 14 pantos at Sheffield’s Crucible and Lyceum theatres, and in two volumes of autobiography, Eyup Knutty (2008) and Eyup Again (2010).
For many years he performed a cabaret act on cruise ships and also entertained troops serving in the Falklands. In 2012, however, a shoulder replacement operation went badly wrong, depriving him of his ability to play the guitar in the finale to his act. In consequence he retired from live entertainment and stuck to acting.
Knutt was married three times and in earlier years earned something of a reputation for his fondness for drink and women. He particularly enjoyed playing the role of Eddie Dawson in Benidorm, describing the character as “a lovable rogue who’s a bugger with the ladies”.
In 1986, he married his third wife, the athlete Donna Hartley, a bronze medallist in the 1980 Olympic Games (4x400m relay). On their 25th wedding anniversary in 2011, he was quoted as saying: “I wish I’d married my third wife first.” But two years later she died suddenly at the age of 58 while sunbathing in their back garden in Barnsley.
“For 12 months after my wife Donna died I was in a very dark place,” he recalled, but Benidorm had helped to get him out of it: “I’ve got a new family and we are just like a real family off screen, I love them.”
Bobby Knutt, born November 25 1945, died September 25 2017