Obituary: Brian Cant

For adults of a certain age, Brian Cant was the personification of children’s television in an era long before the thin gruel of multi-channel plurality.

Avuncular, personable, unabashedly silly and with a voice as softly reassuring as a lullaby, he spent 21 years presenting Play School from its first episode in 1964, 13 years co-hosting Play Away (1971-84) and narrated three fondly remembered animated series written and produced by Gordon Murray: Camberwick Green (1966), Trumpton (1967) and Chigley (1969).

Cant’s fame on television had taken him away from a promising theatre career, although he refused to make a distinction between the two. When asked by The Stage about some of the more peculiar things he had been required to do on screen, he insisted: “I don’t feel silly at all. I’m an actor and we are trained to lose ourselves in the job. If I don’t believe in it, the child won’t.”

Born in Ipswich, his roller-skating maternal grandmother had been a music hall speciality act but Cant initially showed more interest in football, training with the town’s youth team before working as a lithographer in a local printing house.

After a spell in amateur drama, he made his professional debut with the Penguin Players in Buxton in 1958.

Other regional work followed, including Freddie in Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea at Pitlochry Festival Theatre in 1961.

By then, he had gained a foothold in television drama, where he was spotted and invited to audition for Play School in 1964.

Such was its success and longevity, that it spawned a live theatre show, which was seen at the Old Vic Theatre in 1969 and at London’s Riverside Studios in 1979.

In the early 1980s, he toured Brian Cant’s Fun Book and, after leaving children’s television, returned to acting in a touring production of Richard Gordon’s comedy hit Doctor in the House in 1985.

Shaking off his television persona, Cant proved to be “a revelation” (The Stage) as the harassed Broadway producer Hennessey in the musical comedy Dames at Sea on tour in 1989.

In the decade that followed, he was seen in regional theatres in Leatherhead, Mold, Hornchurch and Farnham and in Michael Bogdanov’s touring adaptation of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in 1996. More recent appearances included Middle Ground Theatre Company’s production of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband in 2000 and Paul Elliott’s There’s No Place Like a Home on tour in 2006.

Among his later television credits were Ever Decreasing Circles, Casualty and Doctors.

In 2010 he received a special BAFTA award recognising his contribution to children’s television.

Brian Cant was born on July 12, 1933. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1999 and died on June 19, aged 83.

He is survived by his second wife and five children (two of whom, including the actor Richard Cant, were from his first marriage).