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Eric Allan, who has died aged 85, was a prolific character actor best known for playing country folk, on radio as the gentle, poetry-loving farmhand Bert Fry in The Archers and on television as the blacksmith Frank Blakey in the early days of Emmerdale Farm (later retitled Emmerdale).
He previously had a starring role in Mike Leigh’s first feature film, Bleak Moments (1971), playing a socially awkward teacher, Peter, who is attracted to Sylvia, an office worker and the carer of her learning-disabled sister. In one scene he fulfilled Leigh’s ambition to portray “a couple kissing the way it happens and not the way people always kiss in movies”.
Allan joined Emmerdale Farm in December 1972, just two months after ITV launched the soap revolving around the Sugden family in the Yorkshire Dales. Frank rented the village forge and, when he married Janie Harker (played by Diane Grayson) in 1973, gave the serial its first wedding, with Jack Sugden (Andrew Burt) as best man.
But Frank was unpopular with some locals for his opposition to hunting. When he was threatened with eviction, the programme’s fictional Hotten Courier ran a story with the headline: “Anti-blood sport blacksmith victimised by landlord.” In 1974, Frank left for Essex with Janie after being offered a teaching post.
More than two decades later, in 1997, Allan took over the role of Bert in The Archers from Roger Hume, who had died the previous year. Bert worked for Phil Archer (Norman Painting) at Brookfield Farm, which was later taken over by Phil’s son, David (Timothy Bentinck), and daughter-in-law, Ruth (Felicity Finch).
With a love for old-fashioned country values, Bert took part in local events such as ploughing contests. He also wrote poetry and recited folklore, both entertaining and sometimes infuriating villagers in the fictional Ambridge.
“He’s the character the production team tend to turn to if the storylines are getting too depressing and a bit of light relief is called for,” said Allan. “But people don’t tend to recognise me, because I don’t use my normal speaking voice when I’m playing him.”
Bert’s wife, Freda, was a “silent” character in the serial, never heard, but celebrated for cooking hearty meals at home and baking cakes, pies and bread for village events. When she died of pneumonia after being swept away in the flood that hit the village in 2015, Bert wrote a heartfelt poem in her honour. Bert himself died peacefully in the Bull pub in 2021, falling asleep after a game of cribbage, when Allan decided to retire from acting.
The actor was born in South Tidworth, Wiltshire. His mother, Winnie (nee Ambler), was a midwife who had previously trained at Central School of Speech and Drama and later taught drama, while his father, Eric Allan, served in the army.
The boy was brought up in Keighley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and – after his father became a maths teacher – Wolverhampton. The family emigrated to Canada in 1955 when Eric Sr took teaching jobs in Edmonton, then as a school head in Lake Cowichan, British Columbia.
After attending Victoria College and a drama summer school, Allan returned to Britain to train at Rada (1960-63). He then acted with repertory companies at the Phoenix theatre, Leicester, where he took the title role in Richard II, and the Nottingham Playhouse (both 1964).
A stint at the Mermaid theatre, London (1965-66), followed before Allan joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, first appearing in US (Aldwych theatre, 1966), Denis Cannan’s experimental anti-Vietnam war play. He was also in the 1968 film version, Tell Me Lies, and did two further stints with the RSC, from 1968 to 1969, including a tour of the US when he played the pope in Doctor Faustus, and from 1974 to 1975.
In Bleak Moments, Allan drew on his early adolescence to act the part of the repressed schoolteacher. “All the [roles] I’ve played are people that I could have been had I branched off from my own life at some point,” he told Alan Yentob in a 1982 Arena programme. “For practical purposes [for the role of Peter], I used my own background up to about 15, 16 years old.”
Allan also worked with Leigh on stage in Babies Grow Old at the RSC (1974-75) and in Smelling a Rat (Hampstead theatre, 1988-89); on TV as a quarry worker in Nuts in May (1976); and on radio in Too Much of a Good Thing (1979, not broadcast until 1992).
Among dozens of one-off television parts, he played a con artist in Coronation Street (1977) and the goose seller Breckendridge in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984). He also appeared as the sports editor Reg Prosser in the 1985 BBC series Hold the Back Page.
In 1963, Allan married Susan Allan. She, their daughter, Christie, son, Mike, and five grandsons survive him.
