Sid was a teenage former Borstal boy from Birmingham when he arrived in Ambridge on September 30 1963 and he took his place behind the bar of The Bull in 1972 when he and Polly, the first of his three wives, took over the pub. He continued to run it until his character was killed off in 2010.
Sid made the news in 1979 when, in the episode broadcast the day after the general election (but pre-recorded before the poll), he commented on Mrs Thatcher’s victory. William Smethhurst, the former editor of the series, recalled that “In the studio actor Alan Devereux remained at the microphone expectantly, waiting for an alternative script to be given to him. It wasn’t. The national press happily ran the story – Ambridge, the only place in England that knows the result of the general election...”
Undoubtedly the highlight of his time on the show, however, came in 2000 when he and “saucy line dancer” and country singer Jolene Rogers (Buffy Davis) got down to some serious hanky panky in the shower.
Fans knew that Sid, married to his second wife Kathy (Heidi Niklaus), had fallen for the voluptuous Jolene because they had heard the pair kissing and canoodling, with Sid sighing: “Ooh, Jolene, you shouldn’t be doing that. You’ll be the death of me.”
Though the heavily-trailed shower scene was not the first time The Archers plotline had featured sex, previous affairs had been conducted on the quiet. Sid and Jolene were the first to have “explicit” sex in the series.
Listeners were promised the “raunchiest” episode in the soap’s 49-year history. “They’re in the shower all right,” claimed the editor Vanessa Whitburn. “The actors are excellent and it’s a passionate and sensitive story line.” To family campaigners who condemned the scene she was unrepentant. “It is not a cynical exercise to boost ratings,” she declared. “It is a story about life, and we do them all the time.”
As it transpired, however, many listeners found the scene, recorded in the distinctly unsexy environs of the BBC’s Pebble Mill studios, a bit of a disappointment. “Instead of the sounds of unbridled passion among the soap suds, listeners were treated to a mundane discussion of water temperature and the relative merits of shower gel versus coal-tar soap,” complained one reviewer.
“The scene was so tame that Sid Perks... was able to utter the line 'I’m putty in your hands’ without it even sounding like a double-entendre.”
Alan Devereux was born in 1941 and educated in Sutton Coldfield. Aged 14 he began attending evening classes in speech and drama and a year later went to Birmingham Theatre School.
After featuring in BBC radio plays and in walk-on parts on television, he made his first professional appearance on stage as the young Coriolanus at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1956. He then spent five years as assistant stage manager at the Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham, and the Grand in Wolverhampton.
As well as his long-running role as Sid Perks, he performed in more than 100 radio plays, supplied voiceovers for audio-visual films and radio commercials and also appeared in many television advertisements.
In 2010 Sid Perks was announced to have mysteriously died off-scene while jogging in New Zealand, prompting speculation that Devereux had fallen out with the producers. It seems, however, that he was not in good health and had wanted to go.
In 1965 he married his wife Christine, who survives him with their son and daughter, the actress Tracy Jane White, who played Sid Perks’s daughter Lucy.
Alan Devereux, born 1941, died May 29 2016
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