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Tony Selby, likeable character actor whose career ranged from Ken Loach social-realist drama to the top-rated 1970s sitcom Get Some In! – obituary

Tony Selby as Corporal Marsh in Get Some In! (1975-78) - Fremantle Media/Shutterstock
Tony Selby as Corporal Marsh in Get Some In! (1975-78) - Fremantle Media/Shutterstock

Tony Selby, the actor, who has died aged 83, could play social realism with conviction, but his genial Cockney personality and highly mobile facial features made him well suited to comedy roles; he created a memorable sitcom baddie, the drill instructor Corporal Marsh, in the series Get Some In!

Written with Selby in mind by the creators of The Good Life, John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, Get Some In! (ITV, 1975-78) was a nostalgic look back at National Service in the 1950s and the misadventures of a group of conscripts at “RAF Skelton”.

It regularly attracted 15 million viewers and launched the career of Robert Lindsay, reformed Teddy Boy Jakey Smith (“Smifff, with three fs”). But Selby, who topped the billing, was in his element as the sadistic, sarcastic, insecure and scheming NCO, Cpl Percy Marsh, who craves promotion and delights in bullying the “erks” (as the lowest ranks were known). “My name is Marsh,” he snarls. “B-A-S-T-A-R-D Marsh.”

Selby’s character would be far better known today if the series had been repeated; but, perhaps on account of some outdated language, it is one of a number of shows from that decade to have largely faded into obscurity.

By the time Selby was cast by Thames TV in Get Some In!, he had already established himself in the 1960s as an actor sought out by up-and-coming directors of gritty drama, particularly Ken Loach, who cast Selby in his debut television play, an experimental work called Catherine (1964), for the BBC’s “Teletale” strand; the following year Loach directed Selby again, for the acclaimed Wednesday Play anthology series, in Up the Junction, Tap on the Shoulder, and 3 Clear Sundays, the last of which tackled the barbarism of capital punishment, with Selby on stirring form as the young man sentenced to hang.

Tony Selby, left, with other henchmen planning a heist with Richard Burton, second right, in Villain (1971) - Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Getty Images
Tony Selby, left, with other henchmen planning a heist with Richard Burton, second right, in Villain (1971) - Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Getty Images

The same year he appeared in Edward Bond’s Saved at the Royal Court; the play so appalled the Lord Chamberlain that he refused to grant it a licence, so to get round the restriction the fearless director, William Gaskill, showed it to a private audience under “club conditions”. (The attendant publicity had the effect of hastening the end of theatre censorship.)

As part of a remarkable ensemble of young acting talent, Selby played Fred, leader of a gang of council estate youths – “monsters of amorality” as Alan Brien put it in The Sunday Telegraph – who casually stone to death Fred’s baby in its pram. Selby later recalled hearing the noise of seats being vacated mid-performance by horrified theatregoers.

Attending a rare revival of the play 46 years later, Selby explained that he understood it intuitively because he had grown up on a London housing estate.

Selby, right, with Arthur Lowe, centre, in Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (1973)
Selby, right, with Arthur Lowe, centre, in Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (1973)

From a family of cab drivers and musical theatre performers, Anthony Samuel Selby was born in Chelsea on February 26 1938 and brought up in the Pimlico Peabody estate. His father Samuel drove a cab and was known as “taxi Sam”; his mother Annie (née Weaver) was a seamstress and waitress.

Tony was bitten early by the acting bug and from 10 spent six years training at the Italia Conti stage school. In 1949 he made his London debut as Curly in Peter Pan at the Scala Theatre.

Other theatre highlights over the years included Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow in 1956 with Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop; Lacey in Alfie at the Duchess Theatre (1963 – and uncredited in the 1966 film); a Cockney trooper in Robin Maugham’s wartime drama Enemy! co-starring Dennis Waterman, in 1969; and in 1996 his turn as Ben Rumson in Paint Your Wagon at Regent’s Park open air theatre was nominated for an Olivier award. One of his own favourites was the part of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth (1989).

Of Selby’s films, the two that stand out are Villain (1971) with Richard Burton, and Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (1973), and in 1967 he took a small part in Loach’s kitchen-sink film Poor Cow.

Tony Selby in The Sweeney, ‘Queen’s Pawn’
Tony Selby in The Sweeney, ‘Queen’s Pawn’

Meanwhile over six decades Selby contributed countless solid guest-starring roles to television drama series and sitcoms, among them Crown Court, Bless This House, The Good Life, Minder, Lovejoy, The Bill and its spinoff, Burnside. In a 1975 episode of The Sweeney, “Queen’s Pawn”, he dialled up the flamboyance to the maximum as Johnny Lyon, a cocky London hoodlum who goads John Thaw’s DI Regan into a ruthless pursuit.

The bulk of his fan mail in later years, however, came from Doctor Who fans, after he joined two successive embodiments of the Doctor – Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy – as the roguish mercenary Sabalom Glitz, a sort of intergalactic Del Boy, in “The Trial of a Time Lord” and “Dragonfire”.

Selby as his best-known character, 1978 - Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy
Selby as his best-known character, 1978 - Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy

More recently he gained a wide audience as Phil Mitchell’s uncle Clive in EastEnders; in New Tricks he once again acted opposite his friend Dennis Waterman, one of the original cast of Saved; and in My Family he was reunited with Robert Lindsay.

An actor’s actor, held in high regard by his peers, Selby was happiest performing within an ensemble, and his social life also revolved around friends in the theatre world; other interests included football – he played for the Showbiz XI and supported Queens Park Rangers – and singing jazz standards.

He married first, in 1964, Jacqui Milburn, a dancer; they had two children, Matt and Samantha; the marriage was dissolved in 1981. In 1986 he married, secondly, Gina Sellers (née Bright), who survives him, along with his children and a stepson, Richard.

Tony Selby, born February 26 1938, died September 5 2021