DEREK FOWLDS

(2 September 1937 - 17 January 2020)

The British actor Derek Fowlds, who has died aged 82 from heart failure and sepsis, will be remembered mainly for his television work, although his career embraced theatre and films as well. In the late 1960s, he was the human element in the BBC children’s Basil Brush Show, constantly being upstaged by the eponymous foxy puppet. In the 1980s he was Bernard Woolley, private secretary to politician Jim Hacker (Paul Eddington) often in cahoots with the departmental personal under-secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne) in both series of Yes, Minister and later Yes, Prime Minister. From the 1990s onwards Fowlds played policeman Oscar Blaketon in over three hundred episodes of Heartbeat for Yorkshire Television. Born in Balham, south London, the boy Derek was educated in Hertfordshire where he began performing, although he also had aspirations of becoming a footballer. A job with a printing firm led to amateur dramatics and an eventual place at Rada. At first he worked in rep and later in London at the Royal Court and Hampstead until his West End debut in 1971. He had started in television in 1960 and his first film part was an uncredited role in Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962). Small parts followed in We Joined the Navy, with Kenneth More, Philp Leacock’s Tamahine, Doctor in Distress and Hot Enough for June, both with Dirk Bogarde, East of Sudan with Anthony Quayle, Hotel Paradiso with Alec Guinness, Frankenstein Created Woman with Peter Cushing, and The Smashing Bird I Used to Know with Dennis Waterman. However, most of the time Fowlds was involved in TV series including Z Cars, The Liver Birds and sixty-four episodes with Basil Brush. He played various characters in After That, This, written by Eleanor Bron, John Bird and John Fortune. After that it was mostly television culminating in Yes, Minister, followed by Affairs of the Heart written by the actor Paul Daneman, a futuristic thriller series Rules of Engagement, Chancer with Clive Owen, Firm Friends with Billie Whitelaw and, ultimately, Heartbeat, in which he demonstrated his versatility as both a dramatic and a comic actor. His last film appearance was a cameo in Ray Cooney’s Run For Your Wife (2012) and his final TV parts were in Casualty (2013) and Doctors (2017). Derek Fowlds was first married to Wendy Tory and then to actress and presenter Lesley Judd. Both marriages ended in divorce. He has two sons from his first marriage, the cameraman Jamie and actor Jeremy.

MICHAEL DARVELL