PAINTING’S PLANTING
‘Phil Archer’, the record-breaking actor, talks trees, Warwickshire and soap
In another guise Norman Painting is known and loved by millions around the globe. Few realise, however, that for 40 years this Warwickshire-born lynch-pin of The Archers has also worked hard to promote the Tree Council. Daniel Butler meets the man behind the familiar voice.
“ ‘You are very lucky to be living in leafy Leamington in woody Warwickshire.’ - my teacher told me that 75 years ago and you could say it sums up how I feel today. I am still here and wouldn’t live anywhere else.”
Norman Painting is one of Britain’s best-loved and most familiar actors. Millions enjoy his regular performances and yet almost no one would recognise him in the street. It is only when this quietly-spoken 83 year-old opens his mouth and out comes the soft, homely, voice, that the penny drops. Norman has played the lynchpin role of Phil in The Archers since the series began on the then Home Service in 1951. As a result, he also features in The Guinness Book of Records for playing the longest continual part – 56 years in the same, but ever-evolving, role. But if few of even his greatest fans could recognise the white-haired and bearded actor, fewer still would know of his unstinting work for the Tree Council over the past four decades.
Norman traces his love of trees back to his youth. Although never a country child, he grew up surrounded by leaves: “I was born in Leamington which is rightly famous for its public gardens,” he says. “I never climbed them, mind you – my sister did – but I wasn’t that sort of child. The important thing was that the town was full of trees.”
His parents had moved to the Midlands four months before he was born (his father worked on the railways). The family lived in a rented Georgian terraced house with a fair-sized garden, although he best remembers the airy rooms: “Later, when I was at University I couldn’t work out why I found my digs so comfortable,” he reminisces. “It was the lofty ceilings.” Perhaps this also explains why even today he has chosen to live in a converted barn whose main room is open to the eaves.