Remembering Mr Pastry, entertainer Richard Hearne
Ted Collecott celebrates the career of entertainer Richard Hearne.
WITH his walrus moustache, flapping coat tails and myopic stare, Mr Pastry was a familiar figure on stage, television and film throughout the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies.
The well-meaning, but permanently bewildered, character appeared in pantomime, “TV Fun” comic strips, movies, his own TV series and episodes of “The Good Old Days”.
The man behind the moustache was Richard Hearne. Born in Norwich in 1908, Hearne came from a theatrical family where his mother was a stage performer and his father a clown and acrobat.
Hearne soon learned the family trade and was famously proud to know 49 ways to fall down!
An act where he danced the Lancers in an imaginary ballroom (and with a series of equally imaginary partners) was a gem of out-of-step slapstick and was a routine he performed countless times over the years.
Working regularly on television from 1937, Hearne was soon awarded his own shows and series, including “Mr Pastry’s Progress”, “Ask Mr Pastry” and “Mr Pastry’s Pet Shop”.
Whatever the title, you could always rely on the vague and befuddled Mr Pastry to fall in with a group of children for a mixture of adventure, slapstick comedy and acrobatic mayhem.
Travelling to America in the 1950s, Mr Pastry saw Hearne share top billing with Buster Keaton himself.
A tireless worker for charity, Hearne used his popularity and fame to raise money for children with polio. Countless personal appearances and open days at his own home enabled the Mr Pastry Fund to build hundreds of hydrotherapy pools across the country.
Hearne was elected President of the Lord’s Taverners charity in 1963 and awarded an OBE by the Queen in her 1970 Birthday Honours List for his services to disabled children.
Richard Hearne’s legacy could have been even greater still. When Jon Pertwee moved on from “Doctor Who” in 1975, the show’s producer initially offered the role to Hearne.
As Hearne was then nearly seventy years old, a new male companion was brought into the series to take over more of the action elements in the stories.
However, when producer Barry Letts met Hearne to discuss how he intended to portray the nine-hundredyear-old Time Lord, the BBC executive was surprised to learn that he wanted to play the Doctor as Mr Pastry.
The part went to Tom Baker instead, but you can’t help wondering what the Daleks would have made of a time-travelling Mr Pastry!
Thanks to a renewed interest in classic film and television, many of Richard Hearne’s movies are available today on DVD. Whilst some have not stood the test of time, “Miss Robin Hood” is well worth tracking down.
Here, Hearne plays a writer of children’s adventure stories who is reluctantly conscripted by Margaret Rutherford to track down the theft of a secret whisky recipe.
A final confrontation with the villains sees Hearne, Margaret Rutherford, a regiment of truanting school children and a flock of pigeons (you’ll have to watch it to find out) descend on the London offices of the bad guys!
Richard Hearne passed away in 1979 at the age of seventy-one. He was laid to rest in the quiet churchyard of the village of St Mary’s Platt near Borough Green in Kent.
He left behind him his beloved wife Yvonne, two children and a rich legacy of laughter. The popularity of his films on DVD is a fitting tribute to a very funny gentleman and a very gentle, funny man. n