One of the earliest TV shows I remember watching when I was very small was Play School, a show for toddlers that worked so well it is easy to see its influence in many modern children’s TV shows. Each episode usually featured a couple of presenters, normally one male and one female, and quite often the male presenter would have been Mr. Brian Cant.
Play School may not have been Brian’s first TV role (he appeared in an episode of Doctor Who story “The Dominators” and also appeared in other old shows such as Dixon of Dock Green and Dangerman) but it is certainly the role he held for longest. Play School was to be one of the launch programmes for BBC2, and Brian auditioned for it, got the job and presented (and wrote) it for 18 years!
Appearing on a kids show meant that the more serious roles Brian had been playing started to dry up, so instead he embraced childrens television and went on to be involved in many classic shows.
First there was Camberwick Green, then Trumpton and Chigley, to which Brian lent his voice. These three shows may have been made in the late sixties but they were repeated thorugh the seventies and well into the eighties, and still hold up well today. The design of the cars and so on may have dated a little, but the stories are just as appealing to children as they always were.