The character
Billy Bunter featured in stories about the fictional
Greyfriars School which appeared for over 30 years (in fact, continuously from 1908 to 1940) in the boys' comic
The Magnet, written mainly by author
Charles Hamilton (although, as Hamilton was not always the author, the stories were published under the collective pen-name 'Frank Richards'). Plans to bring the stories to the cinema screen, featuring the comedian
Will Hay as Bunter's form master Henry Samuel Quelch (based on his previous stage and film portrayals as a schoolmaster), had been discussed in the 1930s, but were unrealised. In January 1947, the
Daily Mail newspaper reported that the
Rank Organisation and Rock Productions were interested in resurrecting the film project, with the latter paying a £150 fee to Charles Hamilton, but again the project was dropped. In May 1951, the
BBC Children's Department made public its plans to screen a series of half-hour television shows featuring Billy Bunter as the principal character. These would be broadcast during Children's Hour. Later that year, in December 1951, the BBC announced that it was looking for an actor to portray the character of Bunter, prompting seventy-five hopefuls to apply for the part. The search for a suitable actor received wide newspaper coverage, with the
Daily Mirror covering the auditions both on its front page and in columnist Ian Mackey's 'diary'.
The Daily Telegraph and
Reynolds News were among other newspapers that also provided prominent coverage. When a 29-year-old actor,
Gerald Campion, who was married with two children, was cast in the role of Bunter, a 15-year-old schoolboy, the choice was greeted with mixed reactions. Apart from the matter of his age, Campion, although fairly short and somewhat rotund, was a relative lightweight at 11 stone 2 pounds (70.8 kg), compared with Bunter's weight of 14 stone 12 1/2 lb (94.5 kg) (as described in
The Magnet in 1939), and this added to the controversy (for the television series, Campion would wear padding to make him appear much fatter than he actually was). In fact Campion had already been considered for the role of Bunter, twelve years earlier, when the intention was to make a cinema film based on the character. Veteran character actor
Kynaston Reeves was cast as schoolmaster Mr Quelch (and would play Quelch in four of the seven series, as the only recurring member of the main cast apart from Campion himself), with various unknown child actors cast in the roles of the various schoolboys. As the show continued into successive series over the following nine years, the schoolboy roles would be recast regularly as Campion's youthful co-stars aged beyond the putative ages of their characters. A number of the young actors later carved out successful acting careers as adults, including
Anthony Valentine (cast as Lord Mauleverer and, later, as form captain Harry Wharton),
Michael Crawford (as Frank Nugent),
Jeremy Bulloch (as Bob Cherry),
Melvyn Hayes (as the cad Harold Skinner), and
Kenneth Cope (as school bully Gerald Loder). Being set in a school, albeit a
public school, the show was a production of the BBC's Children's Department rather than the Drama Department, and was aimed at a youthful audience. Accordingly, its first producer was Joy Harington, who had also produced an adaptation of
Richmal Crompton's
Just William stories, and of
Robert Louis Stevenson's children's novel
Treasure Island, among other children's shows. Later episodes were produced by
Shaun Sutton, who would eventually become a long serving head of television drama for the BBC. The programme was made on a small budget. Artist
Tony Hart, who would later become well known as the presenter of TV shows
Vision On,
Playbox and
Take Hart, provided the artwork for the opening credits. The theme music was the "
Portsmouth" section of
Ralph Vaughan Williams's
Sea Songs. The earliest episodes were live performances, broadcast in two timeslots: at 5:40 pm (during children's programmes), and a repeat performance was given live the same evening at 8:00 pm, during family viewing when parents and children might watch together. Many of the television scripts are adaptations, based on the Greyfriars novels featuring Bunter which Charles Hamilton wrote during the 1950s: more than three dozen such novels appeared in print between 1948 and 1965, and many of the television scripts bear titles which echo those of particular books. Indeed, a succession of TV episodes –
Lord Billy Bunter and ''Bunter's Christmas Party'' among many others – were aired under exactly the same title as the novel they were based on. Titles, plots, characters, even dialogue, were lifted wholesale from each novel – by the original author – and aired as a thirty-minute condensed TV adaptation of that novel. ==Reception==