Brian Wilde R.I.P.

[Amethyst_Isle]

One (if not the best ) scenes in the TV series was this imo.....

Fletch: If you want the system to do something for us, give us more freedom, better grub, conjugal visits!

Mr Barrowclough: Conjugal visits?

Fletch: With our old lady, like, all above board, all ship-shape and Bristol Fashion.

Mr Barrowclough: I'm not aware of any prison that does that!

Fletch: Well, maybe not here, but certainly in Holland, and also in America, I believe, where they have a more enlightened penal system anyway. They have these special apartments, where the wife comes to stay and they can manifest their long-felt want for each other.

Mr Barrowclough: You mean they spend the entire time...?

Fletch: Conjugating, yeah.

Mr Barrowclough: That's more than I'm allowed at home!

[David Brent]

An integral part of the classic Porridge series.

Very sad day as another wonderful actor leaves us.

Dave.

[lordtednfs]

God bless you Brian. RIP

_________________
Hooked off the line

[julian_craster]

Brian Wilde: Foggy in 'Last of the Summer Wine'

The Independent
Friday, 21 March 2008

In the long-running, gentle sitcom Last of the Summer Wine, Brian Wilde established himself as the best-loved "third man" among the ageing trio of eccentrics who whiled away the hours in the Yorkshire Pennines by recalling memories past, mulling over the trials and tribulations of the present, and – despite their years – making plans for the future. He had two spells with the BBC programme written by Roy Clarke, which did much for tourism in the West Yorkshire village of Holmfirth.

Wilde joined Last of the Summer Wine as Foggy Dewhirst in 1976, for its third series, to replace the actor Michael Bates, who had played Cyril Blamire since the 1973 pilot but had had to leave two years later after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Foggy was the perfect foil to Bill Owen's carefree, shabby Compo and Peter Sallis as the wry Cleggy. With quiet pomposity and sometimes bombastic mutterings, he introduced military tactics into their madcap adventures. He managed to clear the village café of customers with his recollections of jungle warfare and, at other times, would shock unsuspecting locals by jumping out from a secret lookout post while camouflaged.

Wilde even did some of his own stunts – once, with his leg in plaster, being put in a wheelchair at the top of a hill, which he then had to roll down. One of his favourite episodes was about the reopening of a railway line, which Foggy announced to his friends by blowing a whistle and waving a flag. "I liked it when the engine moved away and we thought Compo was on it and we looked round and he was standing next to us,"recalled Wilde. "The engine was going by itself and we all started running after it – that was a funny scene."

Wilde decided to leave in 1985 but was persuaded to return five years later, following the departure of Michael Aldridge, who had filled the gap by taking on the newly created role of the kind and gentle Seymour Utterthwaite. Wilde remained until 1997.

He later reflected: "When I returned to the show in 1990, it was like starting again. There were so many new faces. I'm not sure that I enjoyed the second lot as much as the first. I was older and less happy about location work."

Although Last of the Summer Wine provided Wilde with his longest-running television role, he is also remembered by viewers for another classic sitcom, Porridge (1974-77), starring Ronnie Barker as the old lag Fletcher, who cynically exploited the prison system. In a performance of understatement and subtlety, Wilde played Mr Barrowclough, the soft-centred and ineffectual prison warder who believed that those in jail would only learn trust by being shown trust.

"You had the old, hard-bitten warders who felt prisoners were inside to be punished, and a new wave of officers coming through who were interested in rehabilitating prisoners," said Wilde, reflecting on the different styles of Barrowclough and his superior, the governor played by Fulton Mackay.

Inevitably in a sitcom, Barrowclough was easily conned by Fletcher and other inmates. He would also confide in Fletcher about his domestic problems – caused by a wife who had affairs with the postman, a marriage-guidance counsellor and others.

Wilde's only regret about the role was that it never turned out to be as prominent as in the 1973 pilot, Prisoner and Escort, when Barrowclough was seen taking Fletcher to Slade Prison, in the wilds of Cumbria. "I had lots to do in it," he said, "whereas in other episodes I wasn't given so much, which was sad."

Born in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, in 1927, Wilde grew up in Hertfordshire, then trained at Rada and gained a grounding in acting at repertory theatres. He worked his way up to the West End, appearing in the Peter Ustinov play The Moment of Truth (Adelphi Theatre, 1951), and soon landed small parts on screen, starting with the BBC murder-mystery Black Limelight (1952) and the film Street Corner (1953).

Wilde's first experience of sitcom was as Bob, flatmate of the title character – a danceband trumpeter, played by Michael Medwin – in The Love of Mike (1960). He later played the put-upon Mr Salisbury in Room at the Bottom (1967), the first television comedy to be written by John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, with Kenneth Connor starring as a cunning maintenance man at the Saracens Manufacturing Company.

More successful was The Dustbinmen, the Jack Rosenthal-created comedy in which Wilde took over the role of Bloody Delilah, leader of the gang of refuse collectors, for the second and third series (1970). He was also frequently seen in popular dramas, including Z Cars (1963-65), Softly Softly (1966), Dixon of Dock Green (1966-67), The Avengers (1967) and The Troubleshooters (1967).

Wild later played the radio station boss Roland Simpson in the first series of the sitcom The Kit Curran Radio Show (1984), starring Denis Lawson as a disc jockey on a small local radio station.

Anthony Hayward

Brian Wilde, actor: born Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire 13 June 1927; married Eva Stuart (one son, one daughter); died Ware, Hertfordshire 20 March 2008.

-----------------------

Obituary
Brian Wilde
Comic actor best known for his work in Porridge and Last of the Summer Wine

Dennis Barker
The Guardian
Thursday March 20 2008


Brian Wilde, who has died aged 80, was a delicate and subtle comedy actor who was especially adept at playing members of the bank-managing and cricketing classes who were not quite as socially elevated as they would like to think, but were nevertheless decent human beings rather than polemical caricatures.

The part that most reflected the man was also the one by which he is likely to be best remembered — "Foggy" Dewhurst, the most middle-class member of the retired Yorkshire trio in the BBC television comedy series Last of the Summer Wine, joining in 1976. Whereas Bill Owen as the scruffy, disreputable Compo was an outrageous nihilist, never worried about — nor even aware of — offending people, Foggy was the ex-executive seeking a rebirth of his golfing career at a snooty club and worried about being discredited by the foul-mouthed Compo and his artisan pig-in-the-middle played by Peter Sallis.

If Owen, the veteran of the radical Unity Theatre, had shades of Compo about him, Brian Wilde had shades of Foggy. Early in his career, fearing that cricket might become a dying art on English village greens, he strenuously recruited his actor chums to home matches near where he lived in Ware, Hertfordshire, and to away fixtures. Poor play was not tolerated. One cricketer invited to play was not invited to bowl, which he thought was his strength, but was put in to bat instead; he was bowled out with the first ball. He was not invited again, despite being a television director who might have put future work in Wilde's way.

Wilde and Owen got on only with difficulty, just as the two characters they played were always brushing each other up the wrong way. Wilde confessed to being rather a fusspot and would look askance when Owen, himself a writer, queried lines or asked for changes in the script. In 1985, Wilde left the cast protesting that it was the happiest series he had ever done, but that he and Owen were having difficulties about "minor" things and that they sometimes went for several days without talking.

The breaking point came after Owen, the previous year, had announced plans for taking Last of the Summer Wine on the road as a stage touring show. This would not have been the sort of thing that would have been to Foggy's taste and it was not to Wilde's, either. He did not like the play, did not like the idea of touring and said so. Foggy subsequently inherited a decorated egg business in Bridlington and in 1985 was written out of the script.

Five years later the charms of the mythical decorated egg factory palled, and Foggy - and Wilde - returned to Last of the Summer Wine, the series consistently attracting high ratings long after it might have been assumed that the formula of three old chaps killing retirement time in a Yorkshire village had exhausted itself and them. He finally left the case in 1997.

After his temporary break with Last of the Summer Wine, Wilde gravitated to another television series in which his persona fitted: Wyatt's Watchdogs (1988), in which he played a retired army major who formed a group of political vigilantes determined to stamp out subversion. This series did not have the broad appeal of Last of the Summer Wine and nor was Major Wyatt as sympathetic a character beneath his risible manner.

"Wyatt's just a pompous old fool," Wilde said of the part. "It required very little effort for me to play him because there's plenty of him in me. Ask my wife and children." This displayed more self-awareness than a truly pompous person could have displayed; and it was in a quite different character that Brian Wilde had first sprung to national prominence as a television actor. He played Mr Barrowclough, the easily put-upon prison officer in Porridge (1973-77), always being taken for a ride by the prisoners, and in particular the street-wise Fletcher, played by Ronnie Barker.

Once again steering well clear of cardboard caricature, Wilde played Barrowclough as a gasping, blank-eyed victim who was entirely believable as a man who was oppressed at work and hen-pecked at home. Decency, however, always shone through and prevented the character coming across as either merely pathetic or boring. Wilde was always watchable, even — or perhaps especially — when playing the sort of characters who were easy to overlook. He was very funny in an ostensibly quite different role, as the supervisor who was never quite in charge despite his Herculean efforts in The Dustbinmen (1970) for Granada TV.

Born in Lancashire, Wilde was brought up in Hertfordshire and educated at Richard Hale school, Hertford. His first TV appearances were in the early 1960s, when his quiet flair for playing quietly oppressed characters first emerged. One of the roles which showed the way was a middle manager in a factory owned by Andre Morrell, who was hounded from above and below in The Big Ride, a play by John O'Toole for ABC TV's Armchair Theatre slot. Those who worked with Wilde found him a charmingly quirky character with an almost unheard-of (for an actor) love of his own privacy; and they were not surprised by the direction his career took. A reclusive figure, he dodged interviews, preferring the life of a country gentleman.

Wilde was married to Eva Stuart, primarily a BBC radio actor, who appeared with him in Wyatt's Watchdogs as the snobbish owner of an antique shop. Their son Andrew became a film editor and their daughter Sarah studied graphic design. All three survive him.

· Brian Wilde, actor, born June 1 1921; died March 20 2008

[julian_craster]

Brian Wilde

Daily Telegraph
21/03/2008

Brian Wilde, who has died aged 80, was best-known for his role as Foggy in BBC Television’s long-running comedy series Last Of The Summer Wine; he also played Mr Barraclough, the timid prison officer in Porridge, alongside Ronnie Barker as the irrepressible convict Noman Stanley Fletcher.

Wilde took the role of Walter “Foggy” Dewhurst in Last Of The Summer Wine in 1976, as one of the triumvirate of old men seeing out their last years by planning adventures and getting into childlike scrapes.

He was written out in 1985, having wearied (it was said) of tensions within the cast, but returned in 1990, finally leaving in 1997.

With his hangdog face and world-weary air, Wilde had been a familiar fixture of television comedy for some 40 years.

He appeared with the comedian Tony Hancock in a series for ATV in the early 1960s, and in Room At The Bottom for the BBC, a spin-off from a 1966 episode of Comedy Playhouse.

Wilde’s first big television success was as the refuse depot manager known as Bloody Delilah in the ITV sitcom The Dustbinmen (1970).

He followed this with a sinister portrayal of the magician Henry T Peacock in London Weekend’s drama series for children Ace Of Wands (1970-72).

In 1973 Wilde played the prison officer Barraclough in “Prisoner and Escort”, an episode of Seven Of One, a series of seven different stories all starring Ronnie Barker.

The programme proved so popular that the BBC commissioned a series, and the result was Porridge, first aired in 1974.

Wilde’s characterisation of the ineffectual Mr Barraclough was a perfect counterpoint to the knowing quarterdeck manner of his boss, Prison Officer Mackay (Fulton Mackay).

But it was the part of “Foggy” Dewhurst in Roy Clarke’s whimsical sitcom Last Of The Summer Wine that proved to be Wilde’s most enduring role.

He made his debut in series three in 1976, taking over from Michael Bates as one of the three pensioners idling in a picturesque landscape (it is shot at Holmfirth, on the border between Lancashire and Yorkshire).

Wilde’s character was a pompous ex-Army corporal who took command of his ramshackle friends and directed their apparently aimless wanderings with military precision and an NCO’s beady eye.

Although the programme proved enormously successful — its 29th series is currently in production — Wilde apparently became unhappy with a clash of egos among the cast and, having remained with the show for nine years, decided in 1985 to move on to other projects.

When he left, the programme commanded a peak Sunday evening audience of nearly 19 million.

Having been written out of the series — his absence was explained by having him move to Bridlington to run the family egg-painting business — he was replaced for five years by Michael Aldridge, who played a new character, Seymour Utterthwaite.

Brian George Wilde was born on June 13 1927 at Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, but his family moved to the Home Counties, and he was educated at Hertfordshire grammar school.

In 1945, having decided to become an actor, he enrolled at Rada. In the 1960s his film credits included minor roles in The Jokers (1967) and Carry On Doctor (1968).

On dropping out of Last Of The Summer Wine, Wilde went on to star in his own BBC series, Wyatt’s Watchdogs (1988), as Major Wyatt, a retired soldier who forms his own neighbourhood watch group after a burglary at his sister’s house.

Although critics pointed to obvious similiarities between the major and “Foggy” Dewhurst — and despite the motley nature of the ensemble cast — the series, co-starring Trevor Bannister, ran for only six episodes and was not recommissioned.

In 1990 Wilde rejoined the cast of Last Of The Summer Wine, Michael Aldridge having departed, to reprise his role as “Foggy” Dewhurst and to reunite with Clegg (Peter Sallis) and the rebarbative Compo Simmonite (Bill Owen).

This trio was widely regarded as the programme’s definitive, most popular, line-up.

But Wilde’s restoration was cut short in 1997 when he suffered from a mild infection.

It was not thought to be serious, but he decided not to take part in the first five episodes of the 1997 series in case matters worsened. (In the meantime — at Wilde’s suggestion — the actor Frank Thornton, as Truly Truelove, filled the gap.)

But by the time Wilde was fully fit, problems with the recording schedule made his return in that series impossible.

Although Wilde was invited to return in subsequent series, he never took up the offer.

In all, Wilde appeared in more than 100 episodes of Last Of The Summer Wine.

Latterly he had been frail, and a few weeks ago suffered a fall. Brian Wilde is survived by his wife, Eva, and by their son and daughter.

--------------------------------

March 21, 2008
Brian Wilde: The Times obituary
Actor who found success as a loser in two television situation comedies


After a long and busy though largely anonymous career as a supporting actor, Brian Wilde emerged in the 1970s to create two of the most enduring characters of situation comedy: the prison officer Barrowclough in Porridge and the former army corporal Foggy Dewhurst in Last of the Summer Wine.

In Porridge's Slade Prison, which gave him a happy refuge of sorts from an overbearing wife, Barrowclough was a beacon of decency, preferring to see the best in everyone but far too gullible to detect the scams of the inmates led by Ronnie Barker's Fletcher. He was the ideal comic foil to his fellow warder, the draconian Mr Mackay.

The rudiments of the Barrowclough character were in the brilliant scripts of Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais but the writers were the first to acknowledge Wilde's skill in giving him flesh. Much the same could be said of Foggy, devised by Roy Clarke to replace Michael Bates's Blamire in the trio of elderly adolescents whose inconsequential wanderings lay at the heart of Last of the Summer Wine.

With his trademark deerstalker and flourishing a cane, Foggy tried to bring a touch of military discipline to his old school chums, the quietly philosophical Clegg (Peter Sallis) and the grubby, disreputable Compo (Bill Owen). Not only did his carefully laid schemes come to nothing but despite his army training he was no more successful than the others in withstanding the verbal (and sometimes physical) assaults of the show's ferocious women.

Although sharply delineated by Wilde's playing of them, the characters were both distinguished by failure. The difference, as Wilde himself put it, was that while Barrowclough was a failure and admitted it, Foggy was a failure and didn't know it. Wilde put some of his success as a comedy actor down to his lanky physique. He was tall (6ft 3in) but weighed only 13 stone. Another asset was a fastidious delivery, in which every syllable was carefully enunciated.

Born in Lancashire, only 15 miles from Holmfirth, the West Yorkshire location for Last of the Summer Wine, Wilde made his first film and television appearances in the early 1950s, though some were too small to be credited. For the next 20 years or so, until Porridge brought him national recognition, he was seldom out of work but far from being a household name.

On television he was in a couple of Francis Durbridge thrillers and the ITV sitcom, The Love of Mike (1960), in which he played the flatmate of Mike the hero, a philandering dance band trumpeter (Michael Medwin). During the 1960s he appeared with Tony Hancock and in episodes of popular drames such as The Man in Room 17, The Avengers and the science fiction series Out of the Unknown.

Gradually the parts became more substantial. In 1966 he played the personnel manager trying to sort out a group of maintenance men on the fiddle in Room at the Bottom, the first sitcom from the team of John Esmonde and Bob Larbey. In 1970 he took over from John Woodvine as Bloody Delilah, the depot boss, in The Dustbinmen, an earthy comedy about refuse collectors created by Jack Rosenthal.

Although Wilde had most success with comedy, he could also show a sinister side, as when, dressed in black, he played Topcliffe, the royal torturer, in Elizabeth R. Wilde was first seen as Barrowclough in a pilot called Prisoner and Escort, which was shown in 1973 and became Porridge in the following year. He joined Last of the Summer Wine in 1976 after Michael Bates had left through ill-health and stayed until 1985.

These were probably the best years of the series, which celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2003. Wilde was the last to take any personal credit but the chemistry between the three main characters often reached perfection and the audience, which had grown slowly, soared to 18 million.

At the same time Wilde's prickly relationship with his co-star, Bill Owen, became well known. Wilde admitted that they had disagreements over the interpretation of scenes or the cutting of dialogue, and added that “we've never walked off the set in anger - we're too professional for that - though we have a few days when we're not talking”. They also disagreed politically, with Owen, the staunch socialist, having little time for the views of the Tory-leaning Wilde.

In 1983 Wilde declined to appear in a stage version of Last of the Summer Wine, though he insisted that this was because of reservations about the play rather than friction between himself and Owen. Two years later he left the television series, saying that he wanted to do other things. One of these, Wyatt's Watchdogs (1988), gave Wilde the first leading role of his career as a retired soldier (not unlike Foggy) trying to run a neighbourhood watch group. But it was poorly received and lasted for only six episodes.

By 1990 Wilde was back in Last of the Summer Wine and he played Foggy until 1997 when he was forced to drop out because of an attack of shingles. He recovered, but another character, played by Frank Thornton, was created in his place and this time the break from the series was permanent.

Wilde was a private and diffident man, who gave little away in his rare interviews and made no attempt to exploit the fame and accolades which his two high-profile comedy characters had brought him.

He is survived by his wife, Eva Stuart, an actress, and their son and daughter.

Brian Wilde, actor, was born on June 13, 1927. He died on March 19, 2008, aged 80

[kelp]

"Brian, we never did meet, but I did try to see you on many occasions, without any luck. That is my loss. You were a comedy hero of mine, and the comedy scene is now so much lighter without you".
Sleep Well Brian.

[byebyebadman]

i'm gutted. one of my favourite episodes of porridge is when they only stop rioting when mr barraclough asks them to behave. R.I.P.

[HIPPIEDAVE]

Rip Brian.

[Azanti]

Loved him as foggy, never watch it after he left.

I have to confess I thought he had passed away then (That was my mum, 'Oh he's dead')

RIP thanks for many laughs