The railway series series#
The railway series tv#

There were few other actors who worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Peter Sellers and Danny Dyer, and remained unscathed by the experience, just as it is hard to think of many other people who could have a series of novelty hits in the Sixties – including the song Right Said Fred, produced by George Martin and a top 10 single in 1962, and one of Noel Coward’s Desert Island Disc choices, Hole In The Ground – and make their Shakespearean debut on screen at the age of 87, in the role of Tom Snout in the Russell T Davies-adapted A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The railway series tv#

From his TV debut in David Copperfield in 1956 to what will be his parting appearance in Doctor Who next year, reprising his Wilf role for the last time, he managed to occupy a unique place in entertainment. Yet Cribbins’s remarkably long and eclectic career encompassed more than simple emotional catharsis. Inevitably, the scene of an emotional Cribbins waving a valedictory salute has become a social media meme, and never more so than with the news of his death. The final scene that Tennant’s Doctor and Wilf share at Donna’s wedding is a particular testament to Cribbins’s powers of understatement as an actor, as Wilf tearfully bids farewell to the Doctor. Yet the Doctor willingly absorbs a fatal dose of radiation to save Wilf and thereby brings about his regeneration into Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor. In a series of affecting scenes, Cribbins’s character Wilf accidentally brings about the end of his surrogate son, despite offering to sacrifice himself in the process, declaring: “I’ve had my time.” Nearly half a century later, Cribbins, by then firmly ensconced as a national treasure, was central to the send-off of David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor. He was nominated for a Bafta he should have won it. He merrily kisses and embraces her and declares: “I was never so pleased with anything in all my born days.” The cause of Perks’s joy is, of course, the return home of the children’s wrongfully accused father, and the look of quiet happiness that Cribbins delivers as Bobby and “my daddy” are reunited is, in its own way, as affecting as the grander emotional demonstration that duly follows. This duly cues the ending, when Jenny Agutter’s character Bobby meets a happily grinning Perks at the station. The eponymous children secretly organise a party for him and manage to penetrate his gruff exterior in the process. In The Railway Children, Cribbins’s character is initially portrayed as a near-misanthrope who never celebrates his birthday because he doesn’t see the point of so doing.

In both cases, his character was responsible for two tear-jerkingly emotional finales that never fail to make the most hardened Grinch murmur something about “a piece of grit stuck in their eye”. Cribbins, who has died at the age of 93, was beloved by one generation for his appearance in The Railway Children as the superficially crotchety but deeply decent station master Albert Perks, and by another for his appearance in the David Tennant-era Dr Who as the former soldier Wilfred Mott, grandfather of the Doctor’s companion Donna Noble. Amongst the many skills that the late, great actor Bernard Cribbins possessed was the ability to make the nation cry.