Paul Shane played the man who had done twenty summers of a job and still had a scheme going, with a sadness the jokes did not need. It made Hi-de-Hi better than it had to be; it also fixed him there for good.
Fi1m perspective
Ted Bovis sings the theme over the titles of Hi-de-Hi, then walks into the camp in a yellow blazer and starts working the crowd. Paul Shane plays him gruff, broad and portly, a host who has done twenty summers of this and has a scheme for every one of them, the sort of man who would sell you the pool if he thought you could carry it away. Under the joke is something the series did not strictly need: a man who knows exactly how small the job is and has nowhere else to take it. Perry and Croft wrote a sitcom about people paid to have fun. Shane is where the sadness of that lives.
He came to it late. A decade as a club act, a first television part in Alan Bennett's A Day Out in 1972, small jobs through the seventies, and then a three-minute scene in Alf Roberts's shop in Coronation Street, which Jimmy Perry happened to see. Shane was clear about what it gave him: he had been a club act before Ted, and Ted led to everything else he did. Fifty-eight episodes between 1980 and 1988, and then David Croft kept him on, as Alf Stokes the butler in You Rang, M'Lord? (1988–1993) and Jack Skinner in Oh, Doctor Beeching? (1995–1997). The uniform changed. The man in it did not: a working-class fixer with a racket on the go and good reason to expect it to fail.
What works is the company. Croft ran his casts like a repertory, and Shane was at his best with people who knew his timing: Jeffrey Holland as Spike, the apprentice comic who spends most of his time in a gorilla suit or the water, with Su Pollard and Ruth Madoc around them. The pool gag comes round every episode and Croft, directing, times it the same way each time. We laughed at it every time, and more than once we felt a little sorry for Ted afterwards, because Shane plays his schemes as things he already knows will not come off, and lets you see him knowing it. That is the whole performance, and it is a good one.
What does not work is everything the performance kept him from. Most critics noticed the same thing: he never had another part as prominent as Ted, and the later Croft series asked for the same man, first as a scheming butler and then in a gentler key. After 1997 there was theatre and pantomime and the occasional guest spot, A Touch of Frost in 2008 among the last. None of it asked him for anything he had not already given.
Start with Hi-de-Hi, where the sadness under the blazer is easiest to see and the jokes are broadest. The later series are the same act on a different stage, and how much you want them depends on how much you liked him the first time. We liked him a good deal.
Biography
Paul Shane (born George Frederick Speight) was an English actor and comedian. He played Ted Bovis in the BBC sitcom Hi-de-Hi! (1980–1988).
Born in Thrybergh near Rotherham in 1940, Shane worked as a miner at Silverwood Colliery until an accident in 1967. He turned professional as an entertainer two years later, having previously performed part-time in pubs and clubs. His television career began with small roles in the 1970s; Jimmy Perry cast him as Ted Bovis after seeing him in Coronation Street.
Shane later appeared as Alf Stokes in You Rang, M'Lord? (1988–1993) and as Diesel Bob in A Touch of Frost (2008). He was married to Dorothy Shortt from 1961 until her death in 2001. He died in Rotherham in 2013.
