Reg has left the bus
Sunday 16 November 2008 at 18:55 UTC
My cultural heroes are dropping like flies. The past week has seen the deaths of Miriam Makeba and Mitch Mitchell, and now we’ve lost Reg Varney, the great comic actor and star of the seminal 1970s situation comedy On the Buses. In the television series and accompanying feature films Varney played workshy bus driver Stan Butler, who never got his way with the ladies, but could wolf down a plate of chips faster than you can say “Pass the ketchup!”. Pure class.
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Sunday 16 November 2008 at 19:04 UTC
He inspired me to loaf at a tender age. My father is a busdriver, and always complained “On the Buses” rarely included any serious Routemaster action. He would never watch the films. Uncanonical, he called them.
Sunday 16 November 2008 at 19:11 UTC
“…rarely included any serious Routemaster action”
Into a better class of transport porn was he, your pa?
Monday 17 November 2008 at 05:43 UTC
Stan Butler was the perfect anti-hero workshy role-model that Britain needed at the dawn of the 70s, guiding its citizens from the decadent flourish of the previous decade into a vortex of apathy.
My grandad was in the Home Guard and could never watch Dad’s Army - “that lot were never goin’ to beat Mr Hitler, now were they!”
Monday 17 November 2008 at 08:58 UTC
“Frankly grandad, neither were you” was tyhe answer you were wise not to give.
My dad never got over seeing those Hungarian Ikarus bendy buses. Some things were not meant to be.
Monday 17 November 2008 at 09:41 UTC
Some hero at the BBC World Service put this story in the Central Core:
The British comic actor, Reg Varney, has died at the age of ninety-two. His career began in music halls and working men’s clubs before the Second World War but he found lasting fame in the television comedy series “On the Buses”. He played Stan Butler, a happy-go-lucky bus driver who spent his working life trying to dodge his irascible boss, Inspector Blake. The TV series spawned three feature films.
{SOURCES: PA, RTR, AP}
That means every language service has to translate and broadcast it. From the bazaars of Jalalabad to the teeming tunnels of Gaza, the wretched of the Earth shall hearken unto the sad news and curse the Mossad assassins that struck down the one they simply called Al-Rij.
Monday 17 November 2008 at 09:53 UTC
“Some hero at the BBC World Service put this story in the Central Core”
Quite right too, for Al-Rij was a cultural icon of universal import.
Monday 17 November 2008 at 10:02 UTC
“…guiding its citizens from the decadent flourish of the previous decade into a vortex of apathy.”
Which led to the 11-year reign of the Grantham Witch.
Monday 17 November 2008 at 10:19 UTC
The joy of Wikipedia has yielded the knolidge that a nove by Robert Rankin, The Garden of Unearthly Delights, is set in a Varney-worshipping future. That’s my birthday present sorted.
Monday 17 November 2008 at 13:29 UTC
Wasn’t it David Baddiel who once commented - with a tiny degree of pride, if I’m not mistaken - that in no country of the world but Britain could Reg Varney have become a star.
Monday 17 November 2008 at 14:19 UTC
That’s just the kind of vacuous statement I would expect of David Baddiel.