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Hearing Bernard Cribbins is dead is like being told that chocolate digestives have been discontinued

Bernard Cribbins as Nervous O'Toole in The Wrong Arm of the Law (1963) - CAP/SFS
Bernard Cribbins as Nervous O'Toole in The Wrong Arm of the Law (1963) - CAP/SFS

Bernard Cribbins is dead, and generations are computing the loss. How does it feel? It’s like hearing that the park where you played as a child has fallen into the sea. It’s like being told that chocolate digestives have been discontinued. It’s like someone closing the storybook and placing it on a high shelf, out of reach.

I encountered him several times in radio studios over the years, but I last saw him in February, at the funeral of a mutual friend. He looked astonishing, in a smart suit and shoulder-length snowfall of white hair, powering along on a walking frame. On the way out of the crematorium, he took the kerb a bit too quickly. I was standing right next to him, so helped him back on his feet. Somehow, as he rose, he managed to swipe my copy of the order of service.

Why did we love him so much? I think it was the voice. In narrating mode – on Jackanory or Old Jack’s Boat – it had a kindly but unarguable authority. (In his mouth, “this is the home of the Wombles,” became a statement of absolute certainty.)

But it also possessed a sweet, gurgling music; a soft baritone with a distinct coloratura of squeaks and giggles and tootles and yawns. These were sounds that only Bernard Cribbins made, and they were among the most reassuring and delightful in the world. They flowed from him like a river. The Orinoco, probably.

His career contained some unclassifiable performances. He played Gertrude Stein to Wilfrid Brambell’s Alice B Toklas in a strange Swedish comedy about Picasso. He wore an elaborate costume (his favourite) to become the Centipede in a 1976 BBC adaptation of James and the Giant Peach.

Bernard Cribbins in 1962 - PA
Bernard Cribbins in 1962 - PA

But seven decades of acting produces its own typology. At first, there were the innocent young men, cow-eyed, self-doubting, virtuous. In Carry On Spying (1964), he is trainee secret agent Harold Crump, all fingers and thumbs as he tries to attach a holster to Barbara Windsor. (“You’d better just put it in your handbag,” he concedes.) In Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD (1966) he is a good-hearted police constable who staggers into an unusual police box and is flung accidentally into the future. (“It can’t be Sunday,” he says. “I’m playing football Sundays.”)

In Two-Way Stretch (1960), he is Lennie – like Steinbeck’s famous naïf – who shares a prison cell with Peter Sellers’ hard-edged crim Dodger Lane. The cell is a little domestic haven in which Sellers is the patriarch and Cribbins the wifely companion, folding his clothes and telling him to go easy on the sherry. (We feel the unvoiced pain when Sellers switches off the radio, silencing the birthday record request chosen by Lennie’s mother – Don’t Fence Me In.)

Bernard Cribbins, David Lodge and Peter Sellers in Two Way Stretch (1960) - Alamy
Bernard Cribbins, David Lodge and Peter Sellers in Two Way Stretch (1960) - Alamy

Over the years, those virtuous young men became virtuous old men. But there were other types, too. Labourers and foremen, such as Tobermory, the shop steward of Wimbledon Common; the narrator of his hit song Right Said Fred, who fails to shift a surreally indeterminate piece of furniture down a flight of stairs.

And those overbearing fusspots, like Mr Hutchinson, the most annoying guest ever to check into Fawlty Towers, who wants to be assured that he can watch a TV documentary about a Native American leader of the 1860s. (“Is it possible for me to reserve the BBC2 channel,” he trills, “for the duration of this televisual feast?”)

Deviations from these were rare and sometimes upsetting. In Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972), Cribbins plays a sleazy Covent Garden publican who gropes his barmaid – she uses a more explicit word – and encourages the police to arrest a rival for murder. To hear Cribbins deliver lines such as “Half the time he’s pulling your tits instead of pulling pints,” is to feel the world besmirched.

He rarely went back to this mode. In the 1970s, as the British film industry wobbled and tried to steady itself with horror and sexploitation flicks, Cribbins moved in the opposite direction, working tirelessly in children’s television and building a bond with a young audience that lasted all his days, and ours.

Great tragedians are celebrated for their tears. John Barrymore used to ask directors which eye they’d prefer the drops to fall from. But great comic actors also have this facility. Bernard Cribbins had a direct and childlike connection to the emotions. When he turns on the title characters of The Railway Children, humiliated by their misjudged acts of charity, his agony seems as real as their yearning for their lost father.

Bernard Cribbins and David Tennant in Doctor Who - Adrian Rogers/BBC
Bernard Cribbins and David Tennant in Doctor Who - Adrian Rogers/BBC

When Russell T Davies brought him into the cast of Doctor Who as Wilfred Mott, grandfather to Catherine Tate’s Donna, he brought tenderness and regard into the life of that character, and into the programme itself. Wilfred was a good old man, who accompanied David Tennant’s Doctor to the end. This year, Davies, back in control of Doctor Who, persuaded Cribbins to return to the programme.

How will it feel to watch these scenes? To see Bernard Cribbins take his final bow? It will be one last chance to hear that music; the dying notes of a childhood song.