Edwin Apps obit

Edwin Apps, actor and writer who co-scripted the popular 1960s sitcom All Gas and Gaiters – obituary

The clerical comedy elicited letters from bishops asking: ‘How did you know that? It is exactly what happened to me yesterday’

 He was not on the list.

The Swinging Sixties were a time of flourishing for many art forms but not, as Edwin Apps found out, for the sitcom. “It was becoming impossible to write farce,” he said, “because farce has to be about transgression. And in order to transgress, there needs to be a set of rules.” He and his wife and fellow thespian, Pauline Devaney, had turned to writing scripts because there was little else to do while waiting for their agents to call.

Stumped for a setting sufficiently rule-bound, they asked the TV producer Stuart Allen if he had any ideas. Thinking of the old joke, “as the actress said to the bishop”, Allen suggested they write about a bishop whose niece is a stripper. Apps didn’t see how the idea could bear the weight of a full TV series, but the word “bishop” stuck in his mind.

“If a society existed where there were still rules,” he realised, “it was the Church.” From that realisation sprang All Gas and Gaiters, a comedy about the ecclesiastical machinations at St Ogg’s Cathedral. At the centre of things were the easy-going bishop (William Mervyn) and the often tipsy archdeacon (played by Robertson Hare), but the star was the stuttering, accident-prone chaplain, the Rev Mervyn Noote. Apps wrote Noote with himself in mind but Frank Muir, head of comedy at the BBC, decided that acting as well as writing might be too much. The part went to Derek Nimmo and made him a star.

The show, which first aired in 1966, became one of the most popular television programmes of its time, attracting audiences of more than ten million. Although by later standards the humour was gentle, the show broke new ground by using the Church for comedy. After initial reservations, clergy were among the greatest fans. All Gas and Gaiters came to be seen as a clerical precursor to the political comedy, Yes Minister. At the end of its fifth series it seemed to be going strong, but in congratulating Apps and Devaney on another well-received series, Muir told them it would be the last.

Apps recalled that “as Pauline drove us home, I sat slumped beside her as it sunk in that this was the death knell for St Ogg’s and its senior clergy. We had invented them, but they had taken on a life of their own, and, in doing so, had taken us over. Life without them was going to take some getting used to.”

Edwin Apps was born in Wingham, Kent, in 1931, the son of Molly and Bertram Apps, a land agent and auctioneer to whom his nanny would take him for a 15-minute conversation before the six o’clock news. Bertram had been in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War, until grounded in a near-fatal accident.

Edwin was sent in 1940 to St Edmund’s School in Canterbury, where, he later said, “I wasted my time” painting, acting and writing plays. At 12 he painted a picture of the Red Lion pub in Wingham and sold it to the landlord for the then sum of £5. He left school at 17 and joined a weekly rep in Southport, Lancashire, starting as assistant stage manager. In 1949 he spent a week at the Canterbury Festival helping the formidable Dorothy L Sayers, who had given up writing detective stories in favour of drama. He made angels’ wings for the production and helped Sayers out of a bomb crater into which she fell after a sherry party.

Apps studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama and in 1953 was in the first professional production by Peter Hall at Windsor, and went on to appear in regional theatre and the West End. His first big part on television was LJ Halliforth BSc, a master at Chiselbury School, in the BBC comedy Whack-O! written by Muir and Denis Norden, and starring Jimmy Edwards as the headmaster. Apps appeared in more than 25 episodes from 1958.

That same year he married Devaney, whom he had met while acting in a production of Hamlet, he as Horatio and she as Ophelia. They had one child, Barnaby, who became an actor and writer, and remained friends after their divorce in 1981. Devaney and Barnaby survive him, along with his partner, Josette.

He turned to writing in the 1960s and did several adaptations for television, including Charley’s Aunt, which starred Richard Briers, but he continued to act in series such as The Avengers and in plays. At the time he and Devaney wrote the All Gas and Gaiters pilot they were starring in the BBC comedy Three Rousing Tinkles, based on NF Simpson’s stage play, A Resounding Tinkle. Simpson’s brand of humour was surreal. One scene turned upon Apps and Devaney mixing up the food of different animals, causing the dog to turn into a cat, the cat into a stallion, and the stallion into a canary. Predictably the live broadcast of the scene did not go smoothly, as the canary began to screech the moment the cameras rolled.

Having grown up in the countryside Apps was never entirely comfortable in London, and in 1976 moved to a farm house he had bought in a tiny village in the Vendée, where he began a new life as a painter. His varied works, which were exhibited regularly in France, included sequences of bald men, umbrellas and bars, done with vibrant colour and a hint of offbeat, sometimes dark, humour. Fittingly, they also featured bishops in unconventional situations.

Edwin Apps, actor and writer, was born on May 14, 1931. He died of bone cancer on April 16, 2021, aged 89

 

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