Tall, commanding, deep-voiced and usually moustached, Peter Bowles, who has died at the age of 85, was frequently cast as either establishment chaps or gangster geezers.
His most successful roles in the former camp were as Richard DeVere in To the Manor Born (1979-81), one of Britain’s most-watched sitcoms, and The Irish RM from 1983-85, playing Maj Yeates, a British Army officer sent to 19th-century UK-ruled Ireland as a “resident magistrate”.
Bowles also had the class, in acting terms, to interestingly explore the overlaps between the two social groups, combining both sides of the range as an upper-class conman in The Bounder, another TV success which was shown on ITV in 1982 and 83.
Across a 66-year career, he spectacularly disproved the warning of a drama school teacher that his dark hair and rapidly tanning skin meant he “would never play an Englishman”.
Not completely English, though, was the pivotal role in his career: DeVere. Very many English comedies have turned on social differences, but the twist in Peter Spence’s To the Manor Born was that both main characters looked and sounded like the landed gentry. Penelope Keith’s Audrey fforbes-Hamilton, though, considered herself a real lady, while regarding DeVere, who outbid Audrey for her late husband’s country estate at auction, as a false gentleman, exposing him as the child of Czech-Polish émigré parents, his name anglicised to help his supermarket business.
Like another comedy from the same era, Only Fools and Horses, the show was a reflection of the disruptions to the English class system by the recently elected Margaret Thatcher, a shopkeeper’s daughter who had poshed up her voice but was committed to social mobility.
The casting of the charming Bowles helped to offset the potentially nasty snobbery of the premise; it seemed inevitable from the start that Audrey would fall for Richard despite his nouveau roots, and the couple eventually married.
No comments:
Post a Comment