Bernard Cribbins

Who is Bernard Cribbins?

Bernard Cribbins, OBE is an English character actor, voice-over artist and musical comedian with a career spanning over seventy years. He came to prominence in films of the 1960s, and has been in work consistently since his professional debut in the mid-1950s.

Cribbins is particularly well known to British audiences as the narrator in The Wombles, a BBC children's television programme that ran for 40 episodes between 1973 and 1975, and for his roles as the pretentious guest Mr. Hutchinson in the "The Hotel Inspectors" episode of Fawlty Towers and the belligerent barman in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy. He also recorded several successful novelty records in the early 1960s and was a regular and prolific performer on the BBC's Jackanory from 1966 to 1991. Having appeared as Tom Campbell, a companion to Dr. Who in a 1966 feature film, Cribbins is also known for his role, four decades later, as Wilfred Mott, a companion to television's Tenth Doctor.