There was once a Shildon lad who took on Coronation Street, and lost, writes Mike Amos.
Born Peter Wilkinson, and known professionally as Gordon Peters, he was a butcher’s boy who spent his early years in Southland Gardens, behind the Dean Street football ground, before moving to Hunwick, then Darlington, and becoming a resident chorister at Durham Cathedral. Choir school contemporaries included Stephen Hancock, perhaps best remembered for his own part as Ernest Bishop in Coronation Street. There’s a picture somewhere of him on the riverbank, dancing attendance to the dean.
We Googled Gordon Peters over the fish and chips and discovered that he died, apparently unnoticed by the obituarists, on June 16.
Though he’d started work as a Junior Clerk with the United Bus Company in Darlington, then saw service with the Royal Navy, he’d been treading the boards for more than 70 years.
Often he’d been a warm-up man or an understudy, not least to Peter Glaze on Crackerjack. Sometimes, he had parts in shows like Hi-di-Hi, Are You Being Served and in four episodes of Dad’s Army. Remember the one called Put That Light Out where the little lighthouse keeper watched Pete Godfrey throwing rabbit silhouettes? That was Gordon Peters. Remember the workman who came to replace Mainwaring’s bomb-damaged office door? That was him, too.
Venerable readers might also recall him as Widow Twankee in the Sunderland Empire pantomime – he did a very good dame, they reckon – or in summer season at the Priory in Tynemouth or black-tied around the affectionately remembered Bailey Organisation night clubs, dotted around the North-East. Then in 1972, his big chance came.
BBC ran seven pilots under the Comedy Playhouse banner, the intention to offer the best of them a series.
Only two got the nod, one of them the Gordon Peters Show. The Daily Mail supposed him the new Hancock, “He was so funny even the studio crew cheered” wrote Shaun Usher in 1973.
“Despite some viewers hailing him as the next Jacques Tati, or even the new Hancock, the critics were more sceptical” says the website. One reviewer cruelly, supposed Peters to have a face “that looked like it had been put together on the wrong end of an assembly belt.”
The BBC had screened the Gordon Peters Show at 7.30pm on Wednesdays, Coronation Street already firmly occupying the same slot. The show was pulled after just five episodes.
“I was crushed, devastated. I took the blow very badly and it was several years before I got over it” he wrote in From Choir Boy to Comic, his autobiography.
The other show chosen from the Comedy Playhouse line-up in 1972 was Last of the Summer Wine.
I’d gone down to the Shepherds Bush studios to interview Peters in 1973, said Mike Amos, and met him again in 2010 when, aged 83, he returned to Darlington as half of what amounted to a tribute act to Flanders and Swann. Gordon shared the stage with David Carter, who’d been Danny la Rue’s musical director. La Rue, when he first heard Have some Madeira, m’dear, thought it was about cake.
“I’m as fit as a fiddle and enjoy making people laugh, said Gordon. “Besides, my wife would kill me if I stayed at home all day doing nothing.”
Sadly, the show couldn’t go on forever as the Shildon lad was 95. The local man who lost out to Coronation Street, carried on performing until age got the better of him. In the end, Gordon Peters did end up having the last laugh.
Shildon & District's local community newspaper.
