Obituary

Buster Merryfield

Former bank manager who became a television comedy favourite

Of all the tetchy old comedy actors the television audience took to its heart, few were unlikelier than Dad's Army's Arthur Lowe, who found fame in the role of a bank manager, and Buster Merryfield, who really was a bank manager until he replaced a favourite character in the long-running saga of two brothers trying to make life work for them, Only Fools And Horses. Merryfield, who has died aged 78 after being admitted to hospital with a brain tumour, was written into the series after the unexpected death in 1984 of Lennard Pearce, who played Del and Rodney's acerbic Grandad.

A new actor in the same role was briefly considered, likewise the introduction of an aunt figure, but in the end the writer John Sullivan decided to create another, quite different, old codger. Uncle Albert, as he materialised out of Sullivan's typewriter and into Merryfield's person, had the jolly Jack Tar look of Captain Birdseye, never seemed to mind being called an old git, and had but one irritating habit - of forever harking back to the war and his time in the Royal Navy. Only a year later the show, normally half an hour, was chosen to furnish the BBC's 90-minute Christmas Day special up against ITV's Minder equivalent.

Buster Merryfield - he kept his Christian name a closely guarded secret - came from a working class background in Battersea, London. On leaving school, where he was a boxing champion, he started work in the Westminster Bank, eventually to be merged with the National Provincial as NatWest. He enjoyed amateur dramatics and after the second world war, in which he actually served as an army officer in Africa, was tempted to try the professional stage. But now married, with a child on the way, he prudently went back to the bank. He rose to be a manager, and not until the late 1970s, when he was 57, did he choose early retirement, re-christen himself Buster - a childhood nickname - and persuade a repertory company to take him on. Some small parts on television came his way, including one in the four-part Hannah (1980), which went out in a sequence of mini-serials under the umbrella title Love Story. He also made one film, Pick Of The Cherries.

It was when he was a bearded Baron Hardup in pantomime, however, that he happened to be seen by a member of the Only Fools And Horses production team. He was summoned to the Television Centre. "All they wanted to know," he used to recall, "was whether I could put on a cockney accent. As a Battersea boy, I told them, I would have no problem." All he needed to be assured was that he wouldn't be stepping into a dead man's shoes, that it would be a new character. A meeting with David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst followed, and two days later he braved the ordeal of a debut in front of the studio audience. He fluffed his entrance lines but was rescued by Jason, who deliberately did the same and then challenged the audience: "What are you lot sniggering at? You got in for nothing, didn't you?" The audience loved it, everyone relaxed and everything then went swimmingly.

In 1997, after the series had been wound up, Merryfield stumbled and fell when going on to the platform to accept an award at the British Comedy Awards. To those watching on TV he dropped out of the shot altogether, but reappeared briefly with blood dripping from a cut above his eye and said a few words before being led away for treatment.

He and his wife Iris, who survives him, were married for 57 years. They had a daughter and two grown-up grandsons.

Buster Merryfield, bank manager and actor, born November 27, 1920; died June 23, 1999

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