In September 1962, weeks after he had dismissed a third of his cabinet in the Night of the Long Knives, Harold Macmillan remarked that only interfering with The Archers was as serious as interfering with the cabinet. That was the sort of snug-bar bore’s comment that the former landlord of the Bull, Sid Perks, played by Alan Devereux, who has died aged 75, would have used as an excuse for a fight.
Stubborn, opinionated, homophobic, thrice-married Sid, who resigned his captaincy of the Ambridge cricket club when he learned that its star batsman Adam Macy was gay, and who bad-mouthed the Gay Pride couple who ran the rival establishment the Cat and Fiddle, was as different from his alter ego Devereux as a pint of Shires from a slice of Borsetshire Blue. Friends described Devereux as mild, modest and decent.
He had joined The Archers, the world’s longest-running radio soap, set in the fictitious Midlands village of Ambridge, in 1963. (Episode one had been aired by the BBC on 1 January 1951.) When he was written out in 2010, listeners heard that Sid had suffered a heart attack while visiting his daughter, Lucy, and her family in New Zealand. Back at the Bull, Jolene (Buffy Davis), his third wife, was heartbroken – but not for long. She is now married to a scion of Ambridge’s first family, Kenton Archer, who inherited both Sid’s widow and his job running the Bull.
Devereux was one of The Archers’ genuine brummies. Born and brought up in Sutton Coldfield, he went to drama evening classes and left school at 15 to join Birmingham Theatre School, then Birmingham Rep, the Alexander theatre and the Grand, Wolverhampton, as an actor and assistant stage manager. At the Alexander he met his wife, Christine, a lighting technician, whom he married in 1964. Their daughter, the actor Tracy Jane White, played Lucy for several years.
His first role was as young Coriolanus at Birmingham Rep. He went on to feature in hundreds of radio plays and voiceovers before joining The Archers as a reformed teenage tearaway. Jack Woolley (played by Arnold Peters), the Ambridge entrepreneur, philanthropist and Grey Gables owner, gave him a break as barman in the Bull.
Devereux’s Sid Perks was known for his rich, gravelly voice, as recognisable as those of Ambridge luminaries such as Walter Gabriel (played for 35 years by Chris Gittins) and the matriarch Peggy Archer (June Spencer, who has been in the show since the pilot episode). Many listeners complain that several characters today, especially the monied and educated ones, sound the same.
But even those who have never listened to the show were aware of the headline-grabbing shower scene that apparently shocked millions of listeners on 10 November 2000, when Sid, recently divorced from wife number two, Kathy, and on a fitness craze, was seduced at the gym by Jolene Rogers, a country music singer. Few headline writers could resist the word “steamy”, but in reality Sid’s verbal foreplay was confined to the water temperature (too cold) and the relative merits of shower gel over soap. Nevertheless, the scene reaped many complaints about declining standards. Grittier storylines since then have variously raised the tolerance levels of listeners – or driven them away.
Devereux is survived by Christine, Tracy Jane and a son, Ross.
• Alan Devereux, actor, born 1941; died 29 May 2016
