I first saw Brian Cant on Monday 26th
July, 1965 – if that sounds too specific, then it may well be; but
it was certainly within have a day or two of that date, which marked
the first appearance on BBC1 of Play School. The programme had
been broadcast since April 1964 on weekday mornings, on the newly-launched BBC2, with Cant’s first credited appearance (according to the Radio
Times) coming in September of the same year. Its BBC1 repeat,
introduced in the summer of 1965, was a clear sign of the programme’s
growing popularity, and with BBC2 still a relative luxury (reception
required a 625-line receiver), this would have been many young
viewers’ introduction to the series.
Play School replaced Watch
With Mother in its traditional post-lunchtime slot of 1.30pm,
although WWM had also been broadcast at 10.45am for some time
prior to this, and would continue at the same time for the forseeable
future (my earliest recollections of Watch With Mother are of
seeing it in this mid-morning slot).
Brian Cant was co-presenter of Play
School’s first week on BBC1, a fact which may have helped to
cement his reputation as one of the bastions of children’s
television, although the presenters alternated week by week, drawn
from a team of familiar faces, some of whom (Carol Chell, Rick Jones)
are still dimly remembered, whilst others – young actors just out
of drama school – came and went without registering at all in the
popular consciousness. For most viewers, Brian Cant was Play
School: his easygoing, avuncular style came to characterise the
programme, and was widely and less successfully imitated by others.
He was sufficiently familiar for me to
recognise his voice as the narrator of Gordon Murray’s Camberwick
Green when it came to air in January 1966. An LP record swiftly
followed (on EMI’s budget Music for Pleasure label) once again
featuring Brian Cant’s narration and his simple, unaffected
singing, accompanied by Freddie Phillips’ double-tracked Spanish
guitar. In those pre-video days, the LP records of Camberwick
Green (and later, Trumpton) were the only means of
revisiting the programmes while they were off air, and believe me,
those records were played a lot. So it’s no exaggeration to say
that, for me, Brian Cant was the soul of Trumptonshire. From his
recorded narrative, I could easily reconstruct the worlds of Trumpton
and Camberwick Green in my imagination, in some cases
visualising stories I had yet to see on screen.
Brian Cant not only told the story, but
also provided, in the context of his narration, the voices for all
the characters, male and female. Somehow, this seemed entirely right.
It’s impossible to imagine those series voiced by multiple actors.
Cant’s vocal range wasn’t vast: for many characters, he relied on
subtle variations of his own speaking voice, aside from which he
offered a pompous voice for authority figures (such as the Mayor of
Trumpton), a ‘working class’ accent (for the tradesmen of
Trumpton and Chigley) and a higher register female/child voice.
Within that narrow range, however, his ear for timing and nuance was
spot-on.
Gordon Murray’s puppet films were
produced on a level that would nowadays be considered amateur, but
the results were never less than professional. Rather than pay for
expensive studio time, the soundtracks were recorded at home, with
Brian Cant taking up residence in a wardrobe in an effort to minimise
the sound of traffic noise from outside. This wasn’t entirely
successful, as the LP records reveal: one can often hear, faintly,
the sound of vehicles going by – real vehicles as opposed to the
likes of the Trumpton fire engine, or Mickey Murphy’s van – and
Cant’s narration has a distinctive ‘wardobey’ ambiance.
Noticing these ‘defects’ was all part of the fun of listening to
the LPs, quite apart from the opportunity to learn the songs on
guitar.
The songs were something else. Composed
by session guitarist Freddie Phillips to lyrics supplied by Gordon
Murray, they were nothing less than character sketches in miniature,
with some quick-fire wordplay reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan
(not that I noticed this at the time). They were also a sight more
sophisticated than anything else on children’s television. Brian Cant was no great shakes as a singer, but his workmanlike, almost naive delivery leant considerable charm to these wonderful compositions. Camberwick Green offered simple but memorable melodies to
which any young viewer could sing along, but when it came to
Trumpton, Freddie Phillips upped the ante considerably, with
sophisticated chord voicings and modal compositions such as Mrs.
Cobbett, the flower-seller’s song. Mr. Robinson, the plumber, had
one of the best songs of all, with a brilliant counter-16 section
modulating from E Major to a gloomy A Minor 6th, that
rocked backwards and forwards to a diminished second before bursting
out into the brilliant resolution of D Major for the last verse as
our hero triumphs over the adversity of a leaking water tank. Fixing
a hole where the rain got in? Much has been written of the genius of
Lennon and McCartney, but this was brilliance of a different order,
and all in the service of a children’s song about a plumber!
Brian Cant may have been out of vision
for the Trumptonshire trilogy, but he was back in front of the
cameras for Play School’s ‘grown-up’ cousin, Play
Away. This was a programme I never had much time for – it
always felt too juvenile for an older audience, and not enough of a
step up from its predecessor; but I was in a minority, and Play
Away remained popular for a couple of generations. As to growing
up, I never ceased to be fascinated by Trumpton, and made
efforts to see it whenever I could while the series remained on air
(for the record, Camberwick Green, Trumpton and Chigley
received their last BBC screening in 1985, under the children’s
lunchtime umbrella title See-Saw).
It was the unique blend of Gordon
Murray’s puppets (brilliantly animated by Bob Bura and John
Hardwick), Freddie Phillips’ music, and Brian Cant’s charming
narration that made the Trumptonshire trilogy so successful. That
kind of chemistry doesn’t happen often in television or film, and there’s a timelessness about those series that I believe would
guarantee their success well into the future. They were nostalgic
from the word go: few places in England are remotely like
Trumptonshire, yet it's undeniably familiar. Like the creations of
Gerry Anderson, Camberwick Green and its sequels presented us with a fully realised world, an
alternate reality, if you like, where the fire brigade is never
called upon to put out a fire, and there’s a folk dance every
evening at the biscuit factory.
Brian Cant may no longer be with us,
but Trumptonshire lives on…
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