Author

Brian Jameson was born in a cottage hospital near Fordinbridge, Hampshire, England. On the day of his birth, a small black cat was seen trotting through his mother's hospital room. 

His early childhood was spent in Salisbury, a city with a strange mix of the ecclesiastic and the military. Over the garden wall were a theological college, a cathedral, and friendships with the sons of bishops. At the end of the street was a NAAFI. During the Suez crisis, camouflaged tanks were witnessed as they trundled passed the front door. 

At the age of seven, there was a near miss from a Canberra bomber whilst he played in the garden. The jet swerved low overhead, stalled, and spun into the ground to explode by the nearby River Avon.

He attended Chafyn Grove, a private preparatory school, where he longed to be cast in the school plays but where he was considered to be not pretty enough. 

In Salisbury, there were also frequent attendances at the local Infirmary. The result was a total loss of hearing in his left ear, and from then on, communication became a whimsical affair as he charmed and second-guessed his way through life.

From the age of thirteen, he boarded at a school in Dorset.  There he thrived on a diet of morning runs and cold showers. He was also allowed to perform in the school plays and caught the acting bug. 

At sixteen, he wrote his first script for BBC Bristol and made his first TV appearance in an appeal for funds to restore the School’s Abbey church. His co-presenter was the Dorset celebrity Ralph Whiteman.

Life in the professional theatre began at the New Theatre Bromley. Here, as a student ASM, he assisted Goon Michael Bentine in the building of a gorilla suit and pitched the theatre into black when he forgot to switch on the mains during a crossfade.

At RADA, he trained to be an actor and discovered stage fright. 

Armed with an acting diploma and various ferocious Alsatian dogs, he went onto guard premises near Heathrow, Tower Bridge and at Consolidated Gold. 

Joining Olivier’s National Theatre at the Old Vic, he ‘Jumped’ for Tom Stoppard, kissed Maureen Lipman as an 18th-century Juvenile and passed the sugar to Anthony Hopkin’s Coriolanus in the canteen. 

For twenty years, Brian trod the boards. As a jobbing actor, he did TV stints on Z cars, soaps, and dramas and appeared in comedy shows from ‘Les Dawson’ to ‘Only Fools and Horses’. He played Brian Epstein in the film ‘Birth of the Beatles’.

He describes his thespian life as a mix of comradery, laughter, blind terror, and the sublime that vanished into the ether.

Appearing regularly on BBC children’s TV, Brian began to write. 

Cynthia Felgate, an executive producer, offered him the chance to train as a BBC studio director.