Well, what else could we mark on 29 December but the 95th anniversary of the birth of that gift to the world, Bernard Cribbins?
Obviously, you know about Jackanory, The Wombles, and The Railway Children, but did you know that early in his career, he played Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire at Oldham Rep? He told The Stage:
On the first night I took my T-shirt off and wiped myself down with it, and a man in the front row was sick.
Of the 1965 Hammer film She he said
It was a very happy film apart from having my bum blown off
…because a detonator accident on set required him to have shrapnel removed from his buttocks.
It was literally that far from the bits and pieces.
As Simon Hattenstone said of him,
Cribbins could sing and dance a bit, had natural comic timing, a way with double entendres and a fabulously malleable face.
…and many people don’t know about his straight theatre work, and extraordinary stage presence — in 1995, for example, the Grauniad said: “Bernard Cribbins, always a good actor, is a revelation…”
(I happened to see it, and he bloody was, too. It was like seeing Dench or McKellen – his charisma drew all your attention.)
He was, of course, part of that scene in The Railway Children — and gave us what we thought was the most heartbreaking thing we’d see in a Doctor Who episode…
Until this one
But he’d also famously (see the picture at the top) been a companion to a different Doctor — Peter Cushing in 1966’s Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 AD — and, as he told Den of Geek:
And, yes, he did make those famous singles in the 60s with George Martin, but some people still don’t know that the two of them also did this:
…which everybody should hear at least once.
