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Simon Stabler talks to a star of Please Sir! and The Fenn Street Gang

- Simon Stabler

If you are a fan of quiz shows, then there's a good chance that you know which famous faces were born Reginald Dwight, Harry Webb and Maurice Micklewhite. But even if you're a Chaser or an Egghead having a really good day, you might struggle to identify Meurig Wyn Jones.

“An older actor said to me with a name like Meurig Wyn Jones, when you attend an audition, people would be expecting you to speak with a strong Welsh accent,” explains the actor and writer David Barry who is best known as supposed hardman/confirmed mummy's boy Frankie Abbott in the sitcom Please Sir!

“When I attended stage school, kitchen sink drama hadn't happened, we hadn't had regional accents from Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay and all that, so you were expected to speak like royalty.”

Despite David being born in Bangor to Welsh parents, his father was “was a London Welshman, really”, serving in Civil Defence in the capital during the blitz until returning to Wales in 1942.

“My parents, brother and I moved to south-east England when I was 10 years old. My parents were very fond of the arts. And they were doing amateur dramatics at a Welsh society in Twickenham, doing The Corn Is Green by Emlyn Williams. And they wanted a Welsh speaking boy. So, I got the part of the schoolboy.

“And another English boy came in and he was going to Corona Academy stage school. So, I pestered my parents, I said: ‘That's what I want to do. Can I go there?’ They said: ‘Well, it’s a fee-paying school, we can't really afford it but we'll go along and investigate.’ Well, when they saw me at the age of 12, I only looked about nine years old, they said: ‘We can guarantee we'll get him enough work to pay his school fees; which is what happened.”