RIP Stephen Lewis

(14-08-2015 11:33 )elgar1uk Wrote:  Blakey wasn't the bus conductor. That was Jack (Bob Grant).

Bob Grant had a very sad end to his life. Despite having trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and having had a successful 20-year career in the West End as an actor, writer and producer, he was so typecast as the lecherous Jack he struggled to find work when On the Buses finished. Indeed, apart from a 1975 one-off pilot reprising the role of Jack as an amorous milkman (which never led to a series) he never appeared on television again.

For a while he worked in panto and musicals and in the 1980s toured in the controversial revue "Oh! Calcutta" (accompanied by a chorus line of naked men and women less than half his age) but the work dried up, the debts mounted and he began to suffer from mental health problems.

In 1996 he moved to a remote village outside Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire. He lived very reclusively and neighbours would see him only when he was trimming his hedge.

Grant had attempted suicide several times in the past, and in November 2003 he was found dead in his garage inside his fume-filled car with a hose attached to the exhaust pipe. He was 71 years old.