The Stage

Norman Painting

Published Tuesday 24 November 2009 at 11:05 by Michael Quinn

“I put him on when I go into the studio and hang him up on the hook when I leave.”

Despite a lifetime playing Ambridge dynasty head Phil Archer - from the 1950 pilot to episodes recorded two days before his death - an achievement that earned him a place in the Guinness Book of Records - Norman Painting was determined not to be confined by the role that earned him now infamous fame and legions of fans around the world. When he published his autobiography in 1982 it was pointedly titled Reluctant Archer.

Born on April 23, 1924, in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, the son of a railway signalman and coal miner’s daughter, Painting seemed set on an academic career - he graduated from Birmingham with a first class honours degree in English before going on to Christ Church Oxford on a research scholarship. He subsequently taught Anglo-Saxon at Exeter College. But success in university drama productions - where he acted alongside Kenneth Tynan and Shirley Williams and was favourably reviewed in The Stage in a 1948 production of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene - led him a different direction.

Playing the lead in a student production of King Lear, he toured the United States in 1950, returning to a job scripting, producing and acting for the BBC’s Light Programme before joining The Archers, initially to write agricultural briefing notes, that same year. Painting’s most dramatic scene came relatively early, when he nursed his dying wife Grace in his arms following a fire, drawing 20 million listeners away from the opening night of ITV on September 22, 1955.

Painting wrote almost 1,200 scripts for the soap under the pseudonym Bruno Milna between 1966 and 1982, stopping only after a heart attack. In The Stage in 1979 Tom Holt described them as “the purest, most typical scripts, the classic instances of the true style”. He also wrote the 10,000th episode in 1989.

He was active as both actor and director in theatre, co-founding Opera da Camera, regularly appearing with Birmingham Rep, working with the Midlands collective Media Players, and in pantomimes across the country. He also devised a one-man show playing piano and reciting poetry. He indulged his passions for horticulture and music by presenting The Garden Game on the BBC for five years and as an enthusiastic organist played for Sunday services in his home of Warmington in Warwickshire.

In 2000 he announced he had bladder cancer, suffering from recurring ill health since then. He died from heart failure on October 29 at the age of 85.

His final appearance in The Archers was aired on November 22.