Colin Bean, Private Sponge in Dad's Army RIP

[Nick Dando]

Obituary | Actor | Colin Bean | Culture | The Guardian



From the Guardian 24/08/09



Colin Bean, who has died aged 83, has a place in television comedy's Valhalla thanks to his recurring role as Private Sponge in the BBC television show Dad's Army. Like the series, Bean was charmingly old-fashioned. He spent almost all of his life in Wigan, Lancashire, where he was born and died.



Bean was stage-struck as a child and pursued his interest in the theatre after school, despite parental opposition, with Frank Fortescue's Famous Players, at Wigan Hippodrome, where he had several walk-on parts. During national service with the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces in Japan, he took every opportunity to gain experience in the forces' acting group and contributed sketches and compered radio shows for the troops.



Returning to Britain, he gained a theatrical grounding at the Northern Theatre School in Bradford. His professional debut, as assistant stage manager and small-part actor at the Sheffield Playhouse, was on his 25th birthday. After nine months there, he spent four years with Harry Hanson's Court Players, starting at the Pier, Hastings, in 1953.



Bean was always welcome at the Watford Palace Theatre, where he appeared in 48 plays and five pantomimes. His first season there was in 1962. The resident director was Jimmy Perry, co-creator of Dad's Army, who would remember him six years later. When playing a pantomime dame at Watford in 1964, Bean said that "so far as dame comedians are concerned … the homely touch and unaffected speech of a true northern comedian generally proves a tremendous asset to any pantomime." Cinderella, at the Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds in 1972, saw him play the dame for the 10th time.



Forming his own production company, he presented a 1974 season of old-time music hall in his home town. He also narrated Peter and the Wolf, for the North London Symphonia Orchestra, in 1972. Few now recall two BBC2 shows Bean appeared in, Broaden Your Mind (1968), a forerunner of The Goodies, and The Gnomes of Dulwich (1969), written by Perry, and featuring Hugh Lloyd and Terry Scott as garden gnomes.



Dad's Army's Private Sponge was initially conceived as an extra, but Perry and his co-writer and producer David Croft eventually gave him more to do, making him a sheep farmer. Bean stayed with the series from its pilot, in black and white, in 1968, to the start of its last season, in colour, in 1977, and became the longest-serving member of the platoon's back row, although he was not in every episode. He reprised his role in the 1971 film version.



Among his theatrical appearances were roles in The Taming of the Shrew (1980) and The Merchant of Venice (1983) at the Octagon, Bolton. He freely admitted to being the sort of actor whose performance responded to wigs, make-up and costumes.



In 1996 he underwent a serious operation and developed complications. He subsequently limited himself to local radio work and, in 1999, published an autobiography, Who Do You Think You Are Kidding? Bean, who never married, made his final public appearance in 2008, at a Dad's Army 40th anniversary event in Thetford, Norfolk, where the show's location shots had been filmed.



• Colin Bean, actor, born 15 April 1926; died 20 June 2009



Nick

[Windthrop]

Colin Bean was, to steal Stephen Fry's term, a thread in the tweed of England. You can't get higher praise than than.