Norman Painting
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Norman Painting, OBE (Born April 23, 1924 in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire) is an actor who has played Phil Archer in the BBC Radio 4 soap opera The Archers since the pilot episodes were aired on the BBC Midlands Home Service in summer 1950. The series went national on January 1, 1951. He is the longest-serving member of the cast.
Painting, a graduate of The University of Birmingham and Christ Church, University of Oxford, was already an interviewer, writer and broadcaster before he first appeared as Philip in The Archers. He first became a script writer for the series in 1967, following in the footsteps of Edward J. Mason, Geoffrey Webb, David Turner and John Keir Cross. He wrote in his memoir of the programme, Forever Ambridge (Ambridge is the name of the fictional West Midlands village in which the programme is set) that he believed that Geoffrey Webb, who had died some time before, was guiding his hand as he wrote. He produced about 1,200 episodes under the pseudonym Bruno Milna. Artistic disagreements with the then editor, plus a general disillusionment with the BBC management, meant that he decided to retire from writing scripts in 1982 and to stick to just performing them.
Perhaps his most famous hour was on 22 September 1955, when Phil's wife, Grace Archer, was killed whilst trying to rescue a horse, Midnight, from a burning barn.
Phil has gone from being the lusty young romantic lead of the early episodes into a father and grandfather. Phil, like his father, Dan Archer, before him has now become a senior figure in the soap, almost a village patriarch. Ill health means Painting does not appear as often as he used to.
