Obituary: Geoffrey Bayldon

Geoffrey Bayldon might well have found fame earlier than he did. In 1963 he was offered the role of the first Doctor in Doctor Who, turning it down (the part eventually going to William Hartnell) because he was eager to leave behind the eccentric old men with whom he was becoming associated.

‏Ironically, it was the even more outlandish Catweazle – the aged, inept and somewhat pathetic Norman warlock thrust into a modern age he found comically incomprehensible and who was forever desperate to weave a spell that will return him home – that made him a household name in 26 episodes from 1970 to 1971. It also gained him a cult following and a fan club that is still active.

‏Bayldon also found himself in another children’s classic, as the sinister Crowman, garbed in a Victorian funeral director’s night-black suit and top hat, to Jon Pertwee’s Worzel Gummidge (1979-81). The show’s success spawned a West End stage version that was seen at the Cambridge Theatre in 1981.

‏After studying at the Old Vic Theatre School, Bayldon had a promising early theatre career before television largely claimed him. He made his professional debut in AP Herbert and Vivian Ellis’s Tough at the Top (impresario CB Cochrane’s last musical) at the Adelphi Theatre in 1949.

‏As a company member at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford upon Avon his appearances included Egeus (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1953) and Duncan to Laurence Olivier’s Macbeth (1955).

‏With Birmingham Rep he graduated to leading roles in Moliere, Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, in whose Caesar and Cleopatra he played Caesar in 1956, which transferred to the Old Vic Theatre.

‏In 1965, he returned to the West End as the Superintendent in Jean Anouilh’s The Cavern at the Cambridge Theatre. Twenty years later he was seen in Bob Larbey’s The First Sunday in Every Month alongside George Cole, with whom he reunited in A Month of Sundays (also by Larbey) at the Duchess Theatre the following year.

‏His most recent stage appearances were in Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of Isaac Babel’s Marya (Old Vic, 1990) and Michael Hastings’ Unfinished Business, directed by Steven Pimlott at the Barbican’s Pit Theatre in 1994.

‏With almost 220 television credits, he was seen on screen from 1952 to his swan song appearance in My Family in 2010. On film, he appeared in King Rat (1965), To Sir With Love (1967), Scrooge (1970), Tales from the Crypt (1972) and as the Governor in the 1979 film version of Porridge.

‏Albert Geoffrey Bayldon was born on January 7, 1924 and died on May 10, aged 93.