 The most familiar of the handful of black actors able to sustain a
career in British television from the 1960s to the 1990s, Norman Beaton became
particularly associated with spirited patriarch roles, most famously as the
eponymous barber of Desmond's (Channel 4, 1989-94), but was a much more
versatile actor than his popular image acknowledged. A highly expressive
performer who was equally at ease with weighty parts and light comedy, he won
great respect on stage and screen but, like many black actors of the time,
frequently found consistent television or film roles, particularly ones worthy
of his talents, thin on the ground.
Born 31 October 1934 in Georgetown, Guyana (then British Guiana), he did some
amateur acting while training as a teacher, and developed a parallel career as a
Calypso singer, scoring a no. 1 hit in Trinidad and Tobego with 'Come Back
Melvina' in 1959. Arriving in Britain in 1960, he became Liverpool's first black
teacher, but the experience was not an entirely happy one, and he was soon back
making music, hanging out with the likes of Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and the
other 'Liverpool poets' and watching from the sidelines as his peers found
success.
He entered the theatre in 1965 with the musical drama Jack of Spades, for
which he wrote both the scenario - inspired by his own experiences as a young
West Indian in Liverpool - and the music. With a flurry of successes as a stage
composer, narrator and, increasingly, actor, it looked like his career was
beginning to take off. His television debut in Charles Woods' 'Drums Along the
Avon' (The Wednesday Play, BBC, tx. 24/5/1967) was followed by a brief stint as
presenter on BBC Bristol's local news programme, Points West. But the first of
many brushes with the law, in the form of an unjust disturbance charge and a
two-week prison sentence, put paid to an offer of a 26-week BBC series on
education and black youth.
This was to be the unhappy pattern of the first half of his career: stage and
screen triumphs interrupted by frequent bouts of unemployment, poverty and
frustration, further complicated by a chaotic personal life. High points
included his stage performances in Jonathan Miller's 1970 production of The
Tempest (as Ariel) and in the energetic and innovative Gilbert and Sullivan
adaptation, The Black Mikado (1975). With the Black Theatre of Brixton (BTB), he
was instrumental in bringing the work of young black playwrights such as Mustapha
Matura to wider attention, and although the venture
eventually collapsed, it laid the foundations for black theatre in the decades that followed.
On television, he was forced to make do with occasional character roles, and didn't escape the kind of ghetto parts (a drug dealer in Barlow at Large, BBC,
1971-73) which were all too often the lot of black actors of the late 1960s and early '70s. But a relatively small part in Pressure (d. Horace Ové, 1975),
Britain's first black feature, was followed by his first series role, as father
to Lenny Henry's feckless teenager in LWT's all-black sitcom, The Fosters (ITV,
1976-77). The show drew criticism for its perceived lack of realism - a lot to
ask of a sitcom - but it represented a breakthrough of sorts.
His BTB association with Jamal Ali led to the dominant role in Anthony
Simmons' energetic feature Black Joy (1977), from Ali's stage play Dark Days
Light Nights, about an innocent Gunayan adrift in Brixton. Although he shared
Ali's concerns about the film's blunting of some of the play's political edge,
for Beaton Black Joy marked a career high point. The film was picked as one of
Britain's two competition entries at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival, and won
highly favourable reviews at home and abroad, many singling out his performance.
The icing on the cake came when he was named the Variety Club's Film Actor of
1977, an achievement he described as "the most wonderful moment in my life".
Posterity has been less kind to the film, but not to Beaton's role in it.
The play Black Christmas (BBC, tx. 20/12/1977), directed by Stephen Frears,
reunited him with another BTB associate, Michael Abbensetts, leading directly to Empire Road (1977-78). Billed as Britain's
first black soap opera, the Birmingham-set series afforded Beaton what was
perhaps his best TV role, as decent but wily local businessman and landlord
Everton Bennett. He enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with Abbensetts in the
years that followed, on 'Easy Money' (Playhouse, BBC, tx. 28/5/1982), the
similarly tough Big George is Dead (Channel 4, tx. 1/10/1987), and, near the end
of his career, on the wry political comedy Little Napoleons (Channel 4,
1994).
He was the lynchpin of Horace Ové's surprisingly jovial racial comedy Playing
Away (1987), and played Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe - not yet the international
hate-figure he later became - in Channel 4's drama documentary 'No, Prime
Minister' (Dispatches, tx. 18/10/1989), criticising the Thatcher government's
stance on South Africa. But overshadowing these - and much of the rest of his
career - was his title role in Desmond's, by some margin Britain's most
successful and popular black sitcom. Created by the youthful Trix Worrell,
Desmond's overcame the problems faced by predecessors like Mixed Blessings
(1978-80), The Fosters and No Problem! (ITV, 1983-85), comfortably transcending
the usual black/white racial agenda and concerning itself with more satisfyingly
complex issues, notably the very different aspirations and experiences of recent
African immigrants and more established Caribbeans. Fundamental to its success
was Beaton's delightful turn as the avuncular but mischievous barber, and his
untimely death in 1994 inevitably brought Desmond's to a close after six
series.
The widespread shock and sadness that greeted the news of his death revealed
just how fondly he was regarded, as did the inauguration, in 1995, of the Norman
Beaton Award at the Birmingham Film and TV Festival to reward outstanding
multicultural work and, in 2003, of the BBC's Norman Beaton Fellowship for new
radio acting talent.
Mark Duguid
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FILM & TV CREDITS
