Ian Carmichael RIP

With Janette Scott in School for Scoundrels

Ian Carmichael

Ian Carmichael, the actor, who has died aged 89, personified with affection and hapless charm the affable, classical silly ass Englishman in scores of revues, light comedies, films and television programmes.

To his wide-eyed boyish grin, bemused courtesy and trusting manner, Carmichael brought an invaluably comic air of innocence to bear on his thousand and one misfortunes. His old-world manners were his technical lifeline, and the lightness of his touch on stage and screen ensured the effect of often-thin material.

He had a particular success in Boulting film comedies of the 1950s. As a conscript in Private's Progress, for example, he immortalised the fears and miseries of a whole generation of national servicemen.

In Brothers In Law he incarnated another gentle innocent at large in a bewildering institution, the legal profession.

But it is probably his portrayals on television of P. G. Wodehouse's dithering Bertie Wooster and Dorothy L. Sayers's elegant Peter Wimsey which etched his gift for the light English comedy of manners most deeply on the nation's imagination.

If he eventually resented his having been type-cast as "the same old bumbling accident-prone clot," the type did his career and the public vivid service and he polished it with care.

Ian Carmichael was born at Hull on June 18 1920. His father was an optician in a family firm of jewellers and silversmiths, and young Carmichael went to preparatory school at Scarborough and Bromsgrove School, Worcestershire. He was not academically inclined.

He preferred to lead the local dance band until the stage took his fancy and he went for a spell to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

After playing a Robot in RUR at the People's Palace, Mile End, in 1939 and Claudius in Julius Caesar (Embassy, Swiss Cottage), he toured in a revue, Nine Sharp, in 1940 before being commissioned for the Army at Sandhurst. During the Second World War he became a major with the 30th Armoured Brigade, and afterwards went back to the theatre. It was while he was touring with the veteran Leo Franklyn in a comic relief double act in The Lilac Domino for seven months in 1949 that he believed he got his best grounding as a light comedian.

After playing Otto Bergmann in a West End revival of Wild Violets, he moved into West End revues, then much in fashion. The Lyric Revue (Lyric, Hammersmith, 1951) transferred to the West End to become The Globe Revue (Globe, 1952). He was the dashingly handsome, song-and-dance star of High Spirits (Hippodrome, 1952). And another Hammersmith revue, At The Lyric, moved to the St Martin's in 1954 under the title of Going To Town.

In these sometimes-brilliant shows which satirised the fashions and foibles of the day, his timing and gravely-expressive features enriched scores of sketches as a polite and easily-embarrassed Briton, trying, say, to change his clothes discreetly or to assemble a recalcitrant deck chair.

Few comedians knew how to look more comically, humanly afraid. His apprehensive subaltern standing rigidly to attention on the parade ground as an off-stage sergeant barked a string of commands which he knew he would never be able, as expected, to repeat to his platoon was a model of silent, facial panic.

Such talent was soon in demand for light comedy, and his harassed television producer in Alan Melville's Simon and Laura (Strand, 1954), trying to prevent the marital tantrums of a famous acting couple from filtering into the soap opera they were performing about their "blissful" marriage, led to other leading West End parts in, for example, Tunnel of Love (Her Majesty's, 1957); The Love Doctor (Piccadilly, 1959), a musical from Moliere; Alec Coppel's murder-farce The Gazebo (Savoy, 1960); Ira Levin's joke about theatre reviewers, Critic's Choice (Vaudeville, 1961); and Melville's Devil May Care (Strand, 1963).

After Carmichael's first New York appearance in the farce Boeing-Boeing in 1965, he was back in London in the Willis Hall-Keith Waterhouse success, Say Who You Are (Her Majesty's, 1965) before what seemed like the only serious-minded play of his career, Shaw's Getting Married (Strand, 1967).

A dullish, two-handed musical comedy in which he played opposite Anne Rogers, I Do! I Do!, (Lyric, 1968) was best remembered for a voice crying out from the front stalls when an off-stage knocking was heard at a door, "For God's sake let them in - whoever it is!"

Carmichael also roved Canada and South Africa in light comedies, and in the 1970s was at the Oxford Festival in Springtime for Henry and in the West End comedy Out On A Limb (Vaudeville) after which he moved back to the North York Moors by the side of the river Esk.

It was the film version of his first straight stage success, Simon and Laura (1955) which established him on the screen. The following year his acting as an artful, conscripted dodger in the Boultings' comedy Private's Progress endeared him to everyone who had ever been called up; and the character occurred, more briefly, again in I'm All Right, Jack (1959).

This time he had just been demobilised and, in looking for work, got caught in a war between capitalists and trades unionists from which he emerged, inadvertently, triumphant.

Meanwhile there had been the title role in the not-very-successfully filmed Kingsley Amis novel, Lucky Jim. Then came Happy Is The Bride, a Boultings joke about rural society weddings, and Left, Right and Centre, in which he played a television personality who stands for Parliament.

In School for Scoundrels (1960) he attended an academy to learn how to shed his gentlemanly in inhibitions in the competition for a young woman's hand, and in Heavens Above (1963) he had a "guest" part as a typically-confused cleric in a Boultings' joke about the Church.

Other films in which he appeared, with variable success, included Light Up The Sky (1960), The Amorous Prawn (1962), Smashing Time (1967), From Beyond The Grave (1972) and The Lady Vanishes (1978) when, somewhat impertinently, he re-created with Arthur Lowe the comic duo of Caldicott and Childers originated by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne in the Hitchcock original.

Television saved his career in the late 1960s from film roles of increasing predictability; and in The World of Wooster, later known as The World of Wodehouse, he turned with gratitude to Wodehouse's bemused, stuttering Bertie.

With Dennis Price as Jeeves this was something of a triumph. Price may have been the better casting and have given the better performance because he was the better actor but Carmichael could count on his personal charm to see him safely through the 20 highly rated episodes in which both actors played together with matchless skill.

Carmichael also won approval for the series Bachelor Father (1970-71); but he took a special pride in his portrait of Dorothy L. Sayers's fictitious detective, Peter Wimsey, which he played for three years, because he himself had worked so hard to see the stories screened.

Wimsey had always been a hero to him. He envied the sleuth his aristocratic insouciance, his prowess, his style, intellect.

Carmichael directed several televised light entertainments such as Mr Pastry's Progress, It's A Small World and We Beg To Differ.

A cricket lover, he was a member of the MCC and chairman of the Lords' Taverners in 1970. He married Jean Pyman Maclean whom he had met at Whitby during the Second World War. She died in 1983. They had two daughters.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/tv-radio-obituaries/7175157/Ian-Carmichael.html