John Sparkes has spent nearly two decades saying almost nothing and being understood perfectly. The Farmer's grumbles and Bitzer's sighs in Shaun the Sheep are a sketch comedian's timing with the words taken out, and they carry the only human sound in the films.
Fi1m perspective
The Farmer in Shaun the Sheep has never said a word we could write down. He grumbles in syllables that are not quite English, with a light Welsh tilt to them, and we know at once whether he is cross about the tractor or the sheep. Bitzer the dog gets a bark and a sigh. Both are John Sparkes, standing at a microphone making noises, and those noises are the closest thing to speech that Aardman's flock is ever allowed.
It is an odd place for a comedian to end up. Sparkes came out of the 1980s sketch circuit, as the anorak-wearing poet Siadwel in Naked Video (1986) and then in Absolutely (1989–1993), before fronting his own Welsh series, Barry Welsh Is Coming (1996–2004), as a hapless chat-show host. Those were talking parts, built on a character saying the wrong thing at length. From the mid-2000s he turned almost entirely to children's animation: the narrator of Peppa Pig from its first episode in 2004, plus Mr Rabbit, Mr Potato and Uncle Pig; several parts in Fireman Sam from 2005; and the Farmer and Bitzer from 2007, through the Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015) to The Beast of Mossy Bottom (2026).
The Shaun work is the one to judge him by, and it is harder than it looks. A grunt has to land on the beat of a stop-motion gag that was built frame by frame months earlier, and it has to tell a child who speaks no English exactly what it tells one who does. Sparkes gets this right so consistently that we stopped noticing he was doing it, which is the point. In The Beast of Mossy Bottom, where Cox and Walker turn the farm into an old Universal horror picture for 81 minutes, we caught ourselves following every one of the Farmer's complaints without hearing a single word, and were faintly unsettled by how easy he had made it look.
The cost of doing it this well is that nobody leaves talking about him. Voice work on children's programmes is treated as a job rather than a performance, and Sparkes seems unbothered: "I get invited to come down to the recording studio and record some noises that's basically it." We would put it a little higher than that. His one live-action film most people will have seen, Calendar Girls (2003), gave him a part called the Welsh Photographer, and everything he has done since has been more particular than that and a good deal less visible.
The next Shaun film, whenever it comes, will not need him to say anything either. It will need him to grumble in the right place, and we cannot think who else could be trusted with it.
Biography
John Sparkes is a Welsh actor and comedian. He voices The Farmer and Bitzer in the Shaun the Sheep television series (2007–) and its feature films, including Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015), A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2019) and Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom (2026). He also provides the narrator voice and other characters in the children's series Peppa Pig (2004–).
Sparkes began performing comedy in the 1980s after earlier work in banking and teaching. His television credits include sketch shows Naked Video (1986) and Absolutely (1989–1993), as well as the HTV Wales series Barry Welsh Is Coming. In film, he appeared as the Welsh Photographer in Calendar Girls (2003). He has voiced characters in other animated series including Fireman Sam and Ben & Holly's Little Kingdom.
