Charters and Caldicott

See Charters and Caldicott (TV series) for the series of this name.

Caldicott and Charters (played by Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford) are two supporting characters in the film The Lady Vanishes, and recurring characters in later films and BBC Radio productions.

Life

Naunton Wayne as Caldicott in The Lady Vanishes

In The Lady Vanishes, the pair are singleminded cricket enthusiasts, rushing back to England to see the last days of a test match. They proved popular with audiences and returned in the Gilliat-and-Launder films Night Train to Munich (1940, also starring Margaret Lockwood) and Millions Like Us (1943), and in the BBC radio serials Crook's Tour (1941, made into a film later that year) and Secret Mission 609 (1942).

Wayne and Radford played similar double acts in several more movies, such as Dead Of Night (1946, sequence directed by Charles Crichton), A Girl In A Million (1946, Francis Searle) and Quartet (1948, sequence directed by Ralph Smart). Another recurring cricket-mad pairing played by them were Bright and Early in It's Not Cricket (1949, Alfred Roome), Helter Skelter (1949, Ralph Thomas) and Stop Press Girl (1949, Michael Barry).

They were intended to reappear in I See a Dark Stranger (1945, Launder), but Launder and Gilliat refused to give them the larger roles in the film that Radford and Wayne demanded as befitting the high profile actors they had now become. As a result, the actors opted out of the film and two similar but differently named characters were substituted. This falling out, however, left Radford and Wayne contractually disallowed from portraying the characters. BBC radio (wanting to broadcast more of the popular radio comedy thriller serials) thus created the pairing Woolcot and Spencer in Double Bedlam (1946), Traveller's Joy (1947), Straker and Gregg in Passport to Pimlico (1949), The Next of Kin (appearing at the end as a "Careless Talk Costs Lives" pair), May I Have The Treasure (1951) and Rogue's Gallery (1952). This also became Berkeley and Bulstrode in Crime Gentleman, Please (1948), and Hargreaves and Hunter in Having A Wonderful Crime (1949) and Fanshaw and Fothergill in That's My Baby (1950). In mid-production on Rogue's Gallery, Basil Radford died suddenly of a heart attack at 55 and Naunton Wayne completed the adventure on his own.

The original script for The Third Man (1949) featured the two characters but they were later streamlined into the role of Mr Crabbin, played by Wilfred Hyde-White.^{[citation needed]}

Charters and Caldicott resurfaced in the remake of The Lady Vanishes (1979) with Arthur Lowe as Charters and Ian Carmichael as Caldicott, and in a BBC television series, Charters and Caldicott (1985) with Michael Aldridge as Caldicott and Robin Bailey as Charters.

In the 1970's, some fans of Charters and Caldicott named their new advertising agency in New York after them.^{[clarification needed][citation needed]}

External links

• BBC Comedy Guide