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Bill Maynard

Bill Maynard built his career around characters who were rarely polished and never dull: blustering optimists, crafty survivors and lovable rogues who seemed to arrive with a story already in progress. Born in Farnham on 8 October 1928, the English comedian and actor began as a variety performer in the 1950s. He adopted the surname Maynard after spotting an advertisement for Maynard's Wine Gums while preparing to perform for the BBC. His first television broadcast came in 1953 on Henry Hall's Face the Music. Variety, repertory theatre, radio and stand-up shaped his early career, which included touring army camps with Jon Pertwee, working on Tyne Tees Television's One O'Clock Show and broadcasting for BBC Radio Leicester. By the early 1970s, acting had moved to the foreground, with appearances in television plays including Dennis Potter's Paper Roses and Colin Welland's Kisses at Fifty. Maynard became a household name as the cheerful, bumbling title character in Oh No It's Selwyn Froggitt, which ran for three series before the follow-up Selwyn. He then showed another side of his comic persona in The Gaffer. As Fred Moffat, the cynical owner of a struggling engineering firm, Maynard played a man forever attempting to outmanoeuvre creditors, officials and anyone expecting payment. The contrast between Moffat and the good-hearted Selwyn Froggitt demonstrated how comfortably he could shift from broad enthusiasm to wary calculation. His film work during the 1970s included five Carry On pictures, among them Carry On Matron and Carry On Dick, as well as all four films in the Confessions series. He also appeared in It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet and played Detective Chief Inspector Stephen Quirk in an episode of The Sweeney. A later generation knew him best as Claude Jeremiah Greengrass in Heartbeat. Joining the ITV drama in 1992, Maynard made the lovable rogue a central part of the series until 2000, then reprised the role in spin-off The Royal. Across comedy, drama, film, television, radio and the stage, his appeal rested on an earthy, immediately readable presence—and a particular gift for men whose schemes were always one step ahead of their circumstances.