John Bird

Satirist and actor whose pairing with John Fortune gave him a long career in popular entertainment.

And he was ideal casting as a university vice-chancellor in Andrew Davies’s series A Very Peculiar Practice (1986), wooing Japanese investment in line with the increased commercialism of higher education in the 80s following government cuts. Bird won two Bafta awards, the first as a performer in 1966, the second, shared with Fortune, in 1997, and was awarded an honorary degree at Nottingham University in 2002. A quiet and thoughtful man, he at first harboured serious ambitions as a theatre director at the Royal Court, home of new theatre writing, where he was an assistant, then associate, director between 1959 and 1963. Never one for the bright lights, Bird admitted to having had periods of drug and alcohol dependency, at one stage claiming that his problems had caused him to become paranoid and indeed suicidal. John was born in Bulwell, Nottingham, the son of Horace Bird, a chemist’s shopkeeper, and his wife, Dorothy (nee Haubitz). And again as Parr, now a knighted admiral of the fleet, he completely blindsided Fortune in suggesting that the large deck of an over-expensive aircraft carrier (“We can’t afford the aircraft and the carrier”) might be used to create swimming pools for the Olympic Games. The final Bremner, Bird and Fortune show was a four-part special in 2008 following the economic crash. Bird was again in his element as a blithely unconcerned investment banker, quizzed by an astonished Fortune on the turbulence in the financial markets as if nothing untoward had happened at all, business as usual, and so on. Bird as Parr, otherwise, could be manifest as a Eurosceptic MP (long before Brexit), and would cut through his own screen of evasive waffle and comic xenophobia to express what he called the innate British dislike of foreigners. While Bremner supplied the acidic vignettes of impersonation, Bird and Fortune perfected an improvisatory double act in which they alternated as interviewer and interviewee, the latter usually named [George Parr, an all-purpose grandee](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYC0P_NBLZw) from politics, big business, the armed forces and public services; Bird later resurrected one of his African despots as George MParrbe, though without make-up, whose nation was, as far as its exact whereabouts was concerned, a state secret. [John Bird, who has died aged 86](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/dec/28/john-bird-actor-and-comedian-dies-aged-86), was a central figure in this phenomenon, appearing on stage and television with a voice in various timbres of reasoning dismay, comic self-justification and utter incredulity. Once he had scored a resounding follow-up success with his sketches in Not So Much a Programme (1964-65), Bird’s path was set in popular entertainment.