Cockney bus driver sent Reg Varney on a long ride

LOVE him or loathe him, Reg Varney’s leering Cockney bus driver Stan Butler was an instant hit when BBC TV presenter David Frost’s “highbrow” consortium began entertaining Londoners in 1968.

On The Buses, starring Reg Varney as hapless bus driver Stan Butler, aired in the UK from
1969 to 1973.

LOVE him or loath him, Reg Varney’s leering Cockney bus driver Stan Butler was an instant hit. Ladies man Butler, his irreverent sidekick Jack Harper, meddling mother Mabel, aesthetically challenged sister Olive, grumpy brother-in-lawArthur and snivelling, autocratic inspector
Cyril Blake quickly attracted up to 15 million viewers after its premiere in February 1969.

The first commercial success for London Weekend Television capitalised on Varney’s popular following from his small screen debut as foreman and pattern-cutter Reg Turner in the BBC’s The Rag Trade, screened from 1961 to 1963.

Varney was born a century ago, on July 11, 1916, at Canning Town in London’s East End, one of five children. His factory-worker father Sid was a brilliant pianist, but could not read music. He led the entertainment in an extended family circle where Varney’s “Mum and Aunty Grace” joined in neighbourhood singsongs, Varney later told audiences at cabaret shows across Australia and New Zealand in 1976.

Reg Varney as Stan Butler in On The Buses.

“I taught myself the piano as a child,” he explained. “At 13, I decided to study eight hours a day learning all those things like arpeggios.”

Educated at Star Lane Primary School in West Ham, Varney left school at 14 to work as a messenger boy at Imperial Wireless and Cable Company, and as a page boy at the Regent Palace Hotel. He was also a part-time piano player, starting at Plumstead Radical Club in Woolwich where he earned eight shillings and sixpence, before working clubs, pubs, cinemas and playing with Jan Ralfini’s Band, earning up to £300 a year.

In 1939 he married Liliane, who became a close adviser and mother of his only daughter Jeanne. In that year he also joined the Boley Club as a pianist-vocalist.

Moving to the El Gaucho Club, then the Windmill Theatre where comedians competed with nude dancers, Varney served with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers as a sheet metal worker in World War II. Later posted to the Far East, he became a stalwart of the Stars in Battledress troop shows.

Demobbed, in 1947 he bypassed would-be comedian Peter Sellers to recruit an unknown Benny Hill as his stooge in a music-hall double act billed as Gaytime. Playing a shy female French tennis player with Hill as her instructor, the camp act entertained holiday makers at Margate and Bournemouth, as well as in London, from 1948 to 1950.

Reg Varney and Billy Raymond worked together in TV series The Rose and Crown in 1969.

His film career began in 1952 in Miss Robin Hood, and in 1953 he played Touchstone the clown in a London production of As You Like It.

As more and more music halls closed down in the late 1950s, Varney’s struggles to interest television producers in his comedy shows were exacerbated when, driving back from a low-billed, one-man show in Scotland, he saw Benny Hill’s name on a TV show placard in huge letters.

His fortunes reversed in 1961 when offered a role in BBC series The Rag Trade, written by Ronald Wolfe and Ronald Chesney. Varney haunted the cutting room of a London rag trade factory to observe details that gave his character authenticity.

“I believe in living it for real,” Varney explained, and after three series was rewarded with a rising national profile.

He launched children’s show The Valiant Varneys in 1964, introducing such characters as foreign legionnaire Beau Varney and Robin Hood’s comrade Jingles Varney.

He had film comic roles in Joey Boy (1965) and The Great St Trinian’s Train Robbery (1966). In 1967 he became the first person to operate an ATM at a London outlet of Barclays Bank.

The Rag Trade writers Wolf and Chesney first pitched On The Buses to the BBC, which saw little comedy potential in a bus depot. Their friend and new London Weekend Television head of entertainment Frank Muir loved the idea.

Despite a poor critical reception, the show was a hit, winning international success in Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Australia.

The success of the BBC’s comedy reject was a turning point: in July 1969 London Weekend Television introduced Doctor in the House, then Spike Milligan’s Irish-Pakistani Kevin O’Grady in the vitriolically racist Curry and Chips.

Varney filmed the first On The Buses movie in 1971 but quit, with six more planned to go ahead, in 1973.

“The writers and I had a meeting and decided we’d had enough ... and thought we’d finish while it was still at the top,” he explained. “The writers said to me, ‘Look Reg, we’ve just run out of ideas.’” 

Varney returned to the stage as a comic and musician. He died in 2008.

Originally published as Cockney bus driver sent Reg Varney on a long ride