My friend and former colleague Roger Foss, who has died of a stroke aged 80, had a lifelong interest in acting and the theatre.
He started out as an actor himself in the 1960s, on stage and in television, but when the work petered out in the 1970s, Roger decided to retrain and to become a journalist. He enrolled at the University of Essex and graduated with a master’s in literature and drama in 1987. I first got to know him when, in the 1990s, he began writing freelance theatre reviews for the listings magazine What’s on in London, of which I was editor – in 2000 he joined the staff as associate editor, later becoming managing editor.
He was a valuable addition to the paper, contributing interviews and features, and he always made London the star. For a time, he had a regular spot on LBC Radio, and he also did publicity for the Brick Lane Music Hall, which later transferred to Silvertown in the East End. Old-time music hall was Roger’s idea of good entertainment.
As sales dropped for many magazines, What’s On was sold to another publisher and, although Roger helped the transition, it eventually closed in 2007. Roger then wrote for the Whatsontheatre.com website and started a theatre podcast. By then he had also begun writing books. He co-wrote Harden’s Theatregoers’ Handbook (2003) with a fellow reviewer, Mark Shenton, and then produced a fascinating history of crazy comedy called May the Farce Be With You (2012), as well as Till the Boys Come Home: How British Theatre Fought the Great War (2018), which demonstrated his deep interest in theatrical history.
Roger knew from an early age he wanted to be an actor. The son of Leonard Foss, a security guard and butcher, and his wife, Violet (nee Clark), he was born in West Ham in east London into a large family. He went to school at South East Essex Technical College, attended acting classes at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in the 1960s and started appearing with weekly repertory companies, eventually working at the Royal Court in Chelsea.
His first television appearance was in the ITV police series Gideon’s Way, in 1964. He played Tinker in the detective drama Sexton Blake between 1967 and 1971, and also appeared in Emergency Ward 10. In 1970 Roger recorded a single, Happy Song, which he performed to Saturday morning cinema audiences around Britain, and he also worked with the Sooty puppet show.
Until the end of his days he was recalling the art of Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, and shortly before he died attended an evening of visual comedy, WAKE, at the Aviva Studios in Manchester, the city where Roger lived with his husband, Liam Donnelly. Roger could not believe how good the young performers were in recreating the style of humour of 100 years ago.
He met Liam in London in 1986, and they married in 2019. Roger is survived by Liam, three sisters, and one of his three brothers.
