Duggie Brown

Singer turned comedian and actor, Duggie Brown was a constant presence on television light entertainment in the 1970s who made the transition into theatre and television drama and comedies with understated personable aplomb.

Born in Rotherham, he studied at the town’s technical college and, while working in a Sheffield steel mill, followed his sister Lynne Perrie into entertainment, enjoying early success as a guitarist-vocalist with the Four Imps (later Four Kool Katz and then the Douglas Browne Four) pop group before turning to comedy in the late 1960s.

An apprenticeship on the northern club circuit led to his TV breakthrough in The Comedians in 1971, followed by regular appearances in variety programmes and gameshows including The Good Old Days, The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, and 3-2-1.

Alongside numerous pantos, his stage appearances included the Fool to Barrie Rutter’s King Lear for Northern Broadsides (1999), the Brontë patriarch in Blake Morrison’s portrait of the novelist-sisters filtered through Chekhov, We Are Three Sisters, at the Viaduct Theatre, Halifax (2011), and a 40th-anniversary stage recreation of The Comedians (also 2011) at the Blackpool Grand. In 2012, he was cast as club impresario Mr Boo in Jim Cartwright’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, directed by the playwright, at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford.  Brown had made his acting debut in 1969 in Ken Loach’s film Kes, quickly becoming part of the director’s go-to ensemble of professionals, notably in the television two-parter The Price of Coal in 1977.

In a period in which dramatists from the north of England were coming to the fore, Brown’s authentic regional credentials led to him being cast in Colin Welland’s Slattery’s Mounted Foot (1970) and Jack Rosenthal’s Another Sunday and Sweet FA (1972) before he took the lead in Shelagh Delaney’s marital comedy The House That Jack Built (1977), as husband to Sharon Duce, although it didn’t survive its first series.

He had another stab at domestic sitcom, again lasting only a single series, as a struggling comedian married to Elisabeth Sladen in Take My Wife (1979), and played a dodgy glamour-agency boss in David Nobbs’ The Glamour Girls (1980) before reuniting with Duce in 1983’s Thatcher-era drama The Hard Word as a couple dealing with the hardships of redundancy.

His other ventures into mainstream drama included Crown Court, detective series The Enigma Files, Brookside, Emmerdale and three roles, his last in January this year, in Coronation Street.

A long-standing member of the Grand Order of Water Rats, he was elected King Rat in 2020. Duggie Brown was born Barry Douglas Dudley on August 7, 1940, and died on August 16, aged 82. He is survived by his second wife, actor Jackie Grimwood, and a daughter, also Jackie, from his first marriage.