Keith Barron

Keith Barron (born 8 August 1934) is an English actor and television presenter, well-known from numerous roles on British television from the 1960s to the present day.

Born in Mexborough, West Riding of Yorkshire, Barron became well known to UK television viewers in the early 1960s as the easy-going Detective Sergeant Swift in the Granada TV series The Odd Man and its spin-off It's Dark Outside. His major breakthrough, however, was as Nigel Barton, an avatar of the writer Dennis Potter in his 1965 plays Stand Up, Nigel Barton and Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton in BBC1's The Wednesday Play anthology series (he later played a very similar character in Potter's Play For Today offering Only Make Believe (1973)). Barron made many one-off television appearances, from Redcap and Z-Cars in the mid '60s, to Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Strange Report, The New Avengers, The Professionals and A Touch of Frost. He made two appearances in Upstairs, Downstairs as Australian Gregory Wilmot. In the 1980s he was a guest in the Doctor Who serial Enlightenment. He also did many voiceovers on British TV adverts and Public information films. In 1989 he starred on television in a moving story of relationships in a new town in the Midlands entitled Take Me Home with Annette Crosbie as his wife and Maggie O'Neill as his girlfriend.

One of his best-loved and best-remembered roles was in the 1980s Yorkshire Television sitcom Duty Free. In the 1990s he co-starred in the sitcoms Haggard and All Night Long. In the 2000s he was a regular character on the ITV Sunday-night drama Where the Heart Is. On the big screen, he appeared in Baby Love (1968) and the David Puttnam film Melody (1971) as Mr Latimer. Keith Barron has also appeared as himself as the guest celebrity in dictionary corner on several episodes of the Channel 4 words and numbers game Countdown.

He was the star on Bunn and Co., a radio show that was broadcast from March 2003 to April 2004 on BBC Radio 4. Barron's performance in the BBC's Test the Nation IQ test show on 2 September 2006 gave him an IQ of 146. In 2007 Barron joined ITV1's Coronation Street as George Trench. In 2011, Barron starred in the BBC show, Lapland, a role which he returned to for a series, Being Eileen, from February 2013.

• Baby Love (1968)
• The Man Who Had Power Over Women (1970)
• The Firechasers (1971)
• She'll Follow You Anywhere (1971)
• Melody (1971)
• Freelance (1971)
• Nothing But The Night (1973)
• The Land That Time Forgot (1975)
• At the Earth's Core (1976)
• Voyage of the Damned (1976)
• God's Outlaw (1987)
• Lapland (2011)
• Being Eileen (2013)

Television roles

• The Foundation
• Telford's Change
• Prince Regent
• Pickles: The Dog Who Won the World Cup
• Room at the Bottom
• Duty Free
• Take Me Home
• Police 2020
• Stella
• Clocking Off
• Benidorm as Deputy-Mayor
• DCI Banks as Arthur Banks
• Ruth Rendell Mysteries A Case of Coincidence as Inspector Masters
• Doctors
• Spywatch

Radio roles

• Not as far as Velma, as Commissaire Henri Castang (1990)
• My Turn to Make the Tea as Mr Pellet (2006)

• Freeling, Nicholas. Not as far as Velma. suttonelms.org.uk