Timothy West

British Actor
Timothy West is an acclaimed English actor and presenter who has had a long and successful career in theatre, television, and film. He is known for his roles in Coronation Street, EastEnders, and Not Going Out, and for his travel series with his wife, Prunella Scales, called Great Canal Journeys.

About Timothy West

Timothy Lancaster West CBE (born 20 October 1934) is an English retired actor and presenter. He has appeared frequently on stage and television, including stints in both Coronation Street (as Eric Babbage) and EastEnders (as Stan Carter), and Not Going Out, as the original Geoffrey Adams. He is married to the actress Prunella Scales; from 2014 to 2019, they travelled together on UK and overseas canals in the Channel 4 series Great Canal Journeys.

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Frequently asked questions about Timothy West

Timothy West is an English retired actor and presenter. He has appeared frequently on stage and television, including roles in Coronation Street, EastEnders, and Not Going Out.

Timothy West is an actor and presenter. He has had a long and successful career in theatre, television, and film.

Timothy West has appeared in Coronation Street, EastEnders, and Not Going Out, among other television programs.

Timothy West is married to the actress Prunella Scales. Together, they have traveled on UK and overseas canals in the Channel 4 series Great Canal Journeys.

Timothy West was born on October 20, 1934.

Timothy West has been awarded a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for his contributions to the acting profession.

Great Canal Journeys is a Channel 4 series that featured Timothy West and his wife Prunella Scales traveling on UK and overseas canals.

Quotes by Timothy West

A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.

Timothy West

Anybody can decide if they have got the money to fight a case if they don’t like a particular thing, and they complain to the watch committee, local council or whatever.

Timothy West

Certain things were deemed to be offensive. It was usually bad language.

Timothy West

I don’t believe in right-angled turning points.

Timothy West

I got very cross with the term, kitchen sink. It just meant that you invaded different kinds of houses, where it was very difficult to avoid kitchen sink.

Timothy West

I’m reluctant to use the word class so much.

Timothy West

In 1968 the Arts Council managed to get a grant from the treasury to buy up a lot of derelict touring theatres and put them back in the hands of the local authorities.

Timothy West

Lord Chamberlain’s readers or controllers, which were a handful of people working directly to him, were a very assorted group of people and some of them tried very hard to be as liberal as they could.

Timothy West

No producer should revive a play unless they have a very good reason for it. I think there’s quite enough about a good play to make it available to new audiences.

Timothy West

Suddenly we saw that you could do plays about real life, and people had been doing them for some time, but they weren’t always getting to the audiences. They were performed in little, tiny, theatres.

Timothy West

The classical writers… playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.

Timothy West

The foyers now look ridiculously small to us because not all that many people used them.

Timothy West

The Long and the Short and the Tall made a great impression on me because it was a very ugly tale about the reality of soldiering at a time when we were being gung-ho about the whole thing of war.

Timothy West

The newly decorated theatres produced things like car parks and restaurants, so you could have a good night out, quite cheaply without all that bother of having to go somewhere else.

Timothy West

There was no real fringe theatre in London until way after the war, so either a play was done secretly with a club licence or it was done openly and had to be assessed along with everything else.

Timothy West

There were loads of plays which were very popular before and after the war, where everybody wore a dinner jacket in the third act and it was in a house that you wished you’d owned with people that you wish you knew. It was life seen through a very privileged way.

Timothy West

Towards the end of the Lord Chamberlain’s era, when his hold was being loosened, private prosecutions began to happen. A member of staff at the Royal Court ordered to stop the play, and the police were brought in.

Timothy West

When you’re writing about people that are not very well off, you seem to see the kitchen sink. So it was a bit of a sort of cosy phrase that got used a bit too much.

Timothy West

You’re not allowed to step out of whatever the rules are, politically, or socially, and they’ll get you for it, they’ll hunt you down. That’s the really frightening thing.

Timothy West