No, the name's not something out of Lord Bonkers' Diary: as this video shows, it really existed. The school was at Tixover Grange, which is near Stamford but in Rutland.
I have seen something of Wilfred Pickles lately, because Talking Pictures TV repeated the situation comedy For the Love of Ada. I watched it on the grounds that anything with Irene Handl in it was worth seeing.
It proved to be gentle and likeable - I can see why it ran to four series and a cinema film. Pickles himself strolled through it rather like a North Country Kenneth Horne.
Pickles (1904-78) had a remarkable career. As a young man in Halifax in the 1920s, he was a keen amateur actor and a friend of another actor from the town, Eric Portman. He joined the BBC North Region as an announcer, and was to become the first national BBC newsreader with a regional accent.
According to an old BBC page:
This was not an early attempt at appealing more to the general public, but actually a move to make it more difficult for Nazis to impersonate BBC broadcasters!
After the war he acted in the West End and on television and radio. He found greatest fame as the compere (with his wife Mabel) of the quiz show Have a Go. In the Fifties it attracted an audience of 20 million for each episode, making him a national figure.
You may remember Pickles playing Tom Courtney's father in Billy Liar, and he seemed to be a jobbing television actor through the 1960s. For the love of Ada ran from 1970-1 and the film came out in 1972.
And of course Wilfred was the uncle of Judge James Pickles, Liberal Candidate in Brighouse and Spenborough in 1964.
ReplyDeleteThank you, David. I knew the judge was Wilfred's nephew, but I'd forgotten that he was once a Liberal candidate.
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