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The actor Alan Rothwell, who has died aged 89, found fame playing Ken Barlow’s younger brother, David, in Coronation Street. He was seen in the TV soap’s first episode, on 9 December 1960, as the cheerful, likable engineering firm apprentice, mending his bicycle in the Barlows’ living room, just as Ken’s new girlfriend arrived.
While his university educated brother would fail to fulfil his highbrow ambitions, David quickly achieved his. He became an amateur footballer with the fictional Weatherfield County, scoring on his debut, then moved to the bright lights of London when a League team signed him in mid-1961.
This departure from the programme gave Rothwell a chance to get wider television experience. He walked straight into a leading role in Top Secret (1961-62) as Mike, the nephew of a British agent (William Franklyn) who teams up with an Argentinian business executive (Patrick Cargill) in Buenos Aires to fight crime.
He had two short stints in Coronation Street for “visits home” over the next few years before returning permanently in 1965. David Barlow’s professional football career had ended through injury and, following a stint as player-coach back at Weatherfield County, he married Irma Ogden (Sandra Gough) and ran the corner shop.
In 1968, when Rothwell announced that he wanted to leave the soap once and for all, David was given the chance to play professionally again with an Australian team, so he and Irma emigrated – and tragedy struck in 1970 when Ken received a phone call with the news that David and his baby son, Darren, had been killed in a car crash.
David Barlow did not feature in the Coronation Street creator Tony Warren’s original plans when he devised the world’s longest-running TV soap opera. Warren recalled the producers saying they wanted him to add a character “representative of the north of England teenager boy”, so he invented David.
Rothwell was cast without an audition, having recently made an impression as the Hardcastle family son – another apprentice engineer – in a BBC television adaptation of Walter Greenwood’s depression-era novel Love on the Dole (1960). He and Warren had previously played schoolboys in a BBC radio Children’s Hour play, Day Trip (1951).
The former child actor went on to become a familiar face as the presenter of two children’s shows. In 1969, he took over from Dorothy Smith on the schools programme Picture Box, featuring short films of stories from around the world, and stayed until it ended in 1990. Meanwhile, preschool children saw him in the lunchtime series Hickory House (1973-77), ably assisted by Humphrey, a banana-loving grey cushion, and Dusty, a bad-tempered mop with a long red nose, as well as a string of co-presenters, including Amanda Barrie and Elisabeth Sladen.
In 1986, Rothwell made a prominent return to soap opera in Brookside as the second husband, Nicholas Black, of Heather Haversham (Amanda Burton); an apparently easy-going charmer, he turned out to be a heroin addict, eventually dying of an overdose.
Born in Oldham, Lancashire, to Alice (nee McNerney) and Harry Rothwell, both cotton mill workers, he was educated at Chadderton grammar school. Aged 12, he appeared as an urchin in the Robert Donat-Dora Bryan film comedy The Cure for Love (1949), then in plays for BBC radio’s Children’s Hour from 1951 to 1960. While training at Rada (1954-55), he was one of the teenagers presenting the magazine show The Younger Generation (1955).
In 1957, he switched to TV to play Leslie Holmes in two episodes of The Appleyards, a BBC soap for children about a suburban home counties family. His big break came back on radio with a three-year run in The Archers (from 1957 to 1960) as Jimmy Grange, a Brookfield farm worker who played guitar in a skiffle band.
Shortly before joining Coronation Street, film fame beckoned. Rothwell starred as a teenage gang member rescued from petty crime and violence by his new girlfriend (played by Carol White) in Linda (1960), screened in cinemas as the support feature to the kitchen-sink classic Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
He then travelled to Sweden for a pioneering attempt to shoot English-language films there, based on Scandinavian stories, for international release. The first Anglo-Swedish production, Two Living, One Dead (1961), directed by Anthony Asquith, starred Bill Travers, Virginia McKenna and Patrick McGoohan, with Rothwell and Michael Crawford, another former child star, playing clerks in a post office raid.
Despite the big names, the experiment was disappointing and failed to get a British cinema release. It was also an unexciting job, with Rothwell telling me 30 years later: “It was very hard to find things to do in Sweden. They were very short on bars and the ones they had were dreadful, so scruffy. You sat down very glumly in a compartment, drank your beer and went out.”
Rothwell headed straight for the Rovers Return and cobbles of Coronation Street. After his Top Secret role, he played Charley Bates in a 1962 TV serialisation of Oliver Twist and Johnny Watson in another BBC radio soap, The Dales, during 1964.
He acted in dozens of radio plays over the next quarter-century and his later TV roles included the Reverend Jackson in Heartbeat (from 1994 to 1995); three parts in Emmerdale; Mr Ronson, neighbour of the young dreamer with wacky ideas, in the children’s series Wilmot (1999-2000); the technophobe local newspaper subeditor Gerry Stringer in the sitcom Dead Man Weds (2005); and the pub quiz aficionado Brian Valentine in the comedy-drama Starlings (2012-13).
Rothwell’s first marriage, to the singer Marjorie Ward in 1961, ended in divorce. In 1967, he married Maureen Hayden. Although they divorced in 1999, the couple were subsequently reunited. Rothwell is survived by Maureen and their sons, Toby and Ben, and a granddaughter, Alys.
