Philip Bird
Philip Bird belongs to the class of English actor who is in everything and top-billed in nothing. The credits gathered here run from a character called Shape in Sapphire and Steel through Brass, Campion and Harry Enfield and Chums, and the pattern is consistent: a vicar, a functionary, a Frenchman, a man with a clipboard and one scene to justify it.
Two of them are the same job twice. He played a character called Peter in Fresh Fields and the same Peter in its follow-up French Fields, which moved the family abroad, and that kind of continuity only happens to actors a production trusts. He worked the soaps as well, appearing as Peter Birch in Emmerdale in 2006 and turning up in Doctors, Heartbeat and Coronation Street. Away from the screen he played Allen Klein in the stage musical Sunny Afternoon in 2014, which is the most specific piece of casting on his record.
Movies (2)
TV (8)
Where to start with Philip Bird
There is no headline role to lead with, so start where the writing is best. The Fades is a short-lived BBC supernatural drama with far more ambition than budget, and it gives him a schoolmaster part inside something genuinely odd. Brass is the other one worth hunting down, a straight-faced parody of northern industrial melodrama that plays its own cliches completely deadpan.
After that it becomes a tour of British television by decade: Sapphire & Steel for the eerie ITV science fiction of the late seventies, Campion for cosy Sunday-night crime, Harry Enfield and Chums for the sketch era. Year of the Rabbit is the funniest thing on the list and Imagine Me & You the softest. Watch these back to back and you get the shape of four decades of working actor rather than a highlight reel.