Stephen Lewis
The career of East End actor Stephen Lewis is defined in the popular memory by two long-running parts. To lovers of gentle, Sunday evening comedy he is Smiler in Last of the Summer Wine (the joke is that, no, he doesn’t smile very much). Thirty something years ago, those same viewers knew him as Inspector Blake in On The Buses (catchphrase ‘I ‘ate you Butler’) delivered at least once per episode to hapless, skiving bus driver Stan Butler - fellow East End comic actor Reg Varney.
It’s not surprising that the two roles have obscured Lewis’s other work - On The Buses racked up an extraordinary 74 episodes, over seven series in just four years from 1969-1973; when ITV had a hit in those days they weren’t shy about exploiting it. And he’s served 17 years so far in Last of the Summer Wine - though that makes him a relative newcomer in a show that’s been running since 1973.
Stephen Lewis has a prouder and more diverse theatrical pedigree though. In the late fifties and early sixties, the Londoner was a merchant seaman working out of the East End docks. His shore leave took him to the Theatre Royal Stratford, home to the explosively creative (and often very difficult) Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop.
Littlewood famously encouraged improvisation, loathing the actorly sheen which performers would apply to their performances. Work by the group included the British première of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1955), which she directed and in which she also played the lead. Lionel Bart came in with Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be; there was Oh! What a Lovely War (1963),and A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney (1958). Much of the work ended up on TV and many actors followed, becoming household faces (and occasionally names): Yootha Joyce, Brian Murphy (the pair better known as George and Mildred), Barbara Windsor, Glynn Edwards and Harry H Corbett.
Part of the deal at Stratford was that the audience were invited to discuss the play with the actors afterwards - no room for fragile thespian egos here. On one occasion, at the bar, Littlewood heard Lewis criticising the play. ‘If you’re so clever, why not do it yourself,’ she replied, a typical Littlewood ploy. Lewis took the bait, but infuriated her by returning to sea afterwards. ‘I had no intention of being an actor’ he explains.
But he returned to Stratford with a friend a year or two later, and was invited to have another go. This time the bug bit. He stayed with the company as they went into the West End with ‘The Hostage’ and ‘Mrs Wilson’s Diary’. There was no going back to sea now.
His real claim to fame came in 1960 when he wrote Sparrers Can’t Sing for the company (though an important thing to remember here is that all the Workshop’s pieces were improvised, so the concept of playwright is somewhat fluid). The piece moved from the Theatre Royal into the West End and then, in 1963, was made into a movie. Littlewood worked hard at keeping things real despite the pressures to produce a commercial success. The film was made in location in Limehouse, Stepney and Bethnal Green, with the Kray brothers appearing on set. Scenes shot in pubs and cafes took the rich local mix of rhyming slang, Yiddish and unadultered cockney accents and put it straight on screen. A minor concession was to retitle the movie ‘Sparrows Can’t Sing’ but it was all a bit too real for the New York Times who remarked ‘This isn’t a picture for anyone with a logical mind or an ear for language. The gabble of cockney spoken here is as incomprehensible as the reasoning of those who speak it.’
Lewis worked his way through the 1960s in a succession of minor theatre and TV roles, his hangdog ordinary bloke looks seeing him cast as a succession of caretakers, lorry drivers, servicemen and police officers. But it was with his casting as Inspector Blake in On The Buses (alongside fellow actor from ‘Sparrows’ Bob Grant) that he came to fame. Lewis and Grant went on to write several episodes of the sitcom. Three feature films accompanied the series, and when the idea eventually ran out of steam, LWT squeezed out a spin-off series, Don’t Drink the Water, with Lewis as Blakey retiring abroad.
Art imitated life as he appeared in the movie The Krays in 1990 but comedy was always the perfect situation for his gloomy looks, with roles in One Foot in the Grave and 2point4 Children (as a driving instructor, naturally) among others. The sitcom Oh, Doctor Beeching saw Lewis as a lugubrious railway worker in 1995 … by which time he’d already started his long stint in the Yorkshire Dales.
pic: Stephen Lewis as Blakey with mutinous bus crew Stan (Reg Varney) and Jack (Bob Grant). London Transport refused to let London Weekend Television film on their buses as they thought it would be bad for their image, so the makers used Essex’s Eastern National buses - note the advert for Southend’s Cliffs Pavilion theatre.