Bob Grant; actor (On the Buses)
Hyfler/Rosner
Bob Grant
(Filed: 19/11/2003) Telegraph
Bob Grant, who has died aged 71, played the lecherous clippie Jack Harper in
the goodheartedly vulgar television sitcom On the Buses.
The series revolved around the laddish activities of Harper and his driver
Stan (Reg Varney), whose No 11 green double-decker served a route between
Cemetery Gates and the depot of the Home Counties-based Luxton and District
Traction Company. The lads liked nothing better than ogling mini-skirted
girls as they got on to the bus, and swapping innuendoes with busty
conductresses who, strangely, found them fanciable enough to disappear up to
the top deck for some slap-and-tickle.
At the same time the pair waged constant guerrilla warfare at the depot
against their humourless inspector (Stephen Lewis), whose catchphrase was "I
'ate you".
The series was first shown in the last days of the Swinging Sixties and
continued until the run-up to the miners' strike of 1974. Its 74 episodes
became a firm favourite not only in Britain but throughout the
English-speaking world. It also led to three films, which avoided
compromising the programme's success by declining to add anything fresh.
Although some remarked that none of the films was worth a bus ride, the
first of them, On the Buses, surpassed even the James Bond film Diamonds are
Forever at the box office. It was eventually subjected to that ultimate
accolade, or perhaps insult - an American copy, entitled Lotsa Luck.
Bob Grant was born in Hammersmith on April 21 1932 and studied at the Royal
Academy of Dramatic Art, working in his spare time as both a bus conductor
and a frozen food salesman.
He was commissioned in the Royal Artillery during his National Service and
worked in rep before arriving in London. He appeared in Big Soft Nellie at
Joan Littlewood's Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in 1961, then landed the
lead role in Lionel Bart's Blitz! at the Adelphi for two years.
He returned to Stratford to appear first in Sparrers Can't Sing and then
Instant Marriage, for which he wrote both the dialogue and lyrics. Eric
Shorter in The Daily Telegraph admired Grant's brash, toothy charm, but
considered that his fearlessly facetious fooling was becoming insupportable,
while The Sunday Telegraph sentenced him to another two years in Blitz!.
Grant played George Brown in the dramatisation of Mrs Wilson's Diary,
written by Richard Ingrams and John Wells, and was so shaken when Labour's
mercurial Foreign Secretary suddenly resigned in 1968 that he at first
offered to stand down from the part. On the Buses shot to instant
popularity, with the result that when Grant married in 1971, the hundreds of
fans forced the newly marrieds to abandon their hired Rolls-Royce, and the
guests the double-decker, in order to walk to the reception.
Grant wrote several more comedies, including Home is Where Your Clothes Are,
about two people sharing one room at different times of the week, and No
Room for Love, concerning a doctor who arrives at a hotel with his
receptionist only to find that his wife is also there.
After On the Buses finished he toured Australia in No Sex Please We're
British, and appeared in musicals and pantomimes in the provinces. But the
years were not unduly kind. In 1987 he disappeared for five days before
responding to a public appeal by his wife; and his neighbours in
Gloucestershire usually only saw him when he was trimming his hedge.
He was found dead on November 8 and is survived by his wife Kim.