Presenter of children's favourite Rainbow

Born: March 13, 1942;

Died: October 1, 2018

GEOFFREY Hayes, who has died aged 76, was an English actor and television presenter whose career was defined by his role as the host of the children’s television programme Rainbow between 1974 and 1993. Although the job certainly typecast him, it was a part which gave him a more enduring legacy than most; for nearly two decades, as the kind, fatherly wrangler of the mischievous puppet characters George, Zippy and Bungle, he cemented a fond place in the childhood memories of generations of young viewers.

Born into a working class family in Stockport, Cheshire, in 1942, Hayes made a living in the early years of his career as an actor in repertory theatre and with some extremely brief television drama cameos; he was a policeman in an episode of Detective (1968), a lorry driver in an episode of Dixon of Dock Green (1968), a taxi driver in a couple of episodes of the drama Harriet’s Back in Town (1973), and he also made a brief appearance in Z-Cars in 1969.

Two years later he returned to the latter series as DC Dave Scatliff, a one-off appearance which the producers liked, inviting him back to be one of the semi-permanent supporting cast. Between 1971 and 1974 Hayes was in nearly 30 episodes of the police drama, a prime-time hit on British television, although he later noted that he wasn’t once recognised in the street for it. Yet the show was filmed at Television Centre in London on the same evening as Top of the Pops, and Hayes enjoyed the feeling of being at the centre of the business, of having a drink in the bar with pop stars and celebrities alongside after work.

The recognition was to come in an unexpected way, however, with a job which Hayes took purely in the hope that it might lend him some job security. Sharing a maisonette in Hampstead with six other people and hopeful of getting a foot on the property ladder and moving into his own place, he bumped into his old repertory colleague Dave Cook while doing a job at Thames Television. At that time Cook was the presenter of new kids’ show Rainbow, but he was leaving after less than a year, and he suggested Hayes ask for an audition; excited by the thought of a one-year contract and the ability to get a mortgage which would come with it, Hayes went for it and got the job.

When Rainbow was cancelled in 1993 and Hayes had to return to the life of a working actor, he found it hard to escape the typecasting his most famous role had brought. He made jokey personal appearances with the Rainbow characters in pantomime and at student clubs, and traded on his past career with cameos in the video for a 1996 cover of I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing by tribute band No Way Sis, and in the clip accompanying Tony Christie and Peter Kay’s 2005 charity cover of (Is This the Way to) Amarillo?

He was a guest on the quiz shows Never Mind the Buzzcocks in 2002 and Pointless Celebrities in 2015, and also got work stacking supermarket shelves and as a taxi driver in order to pay the bills. Yet in later life, he seemed humbled in interviews by the effect his most famous work had on people. “It’s so humbling, even now, all these years later, somebody occasionally stops me in the street or the supermarket and talks about Rainbow,” he said in 2014. “We loved doing it; I certainly did. Twenty years of happiness, it really was.”

Geoffrey Hayes died of pneumonia, and is survived by his wife Sarah and son Tom.

DAVID POLLOCK

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