Fred Feast
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Fred Feast (October 5, 1929 - June 25, 1999) was a British actor, born in Scarborough.
He was best known for his role as the Rovers Return's "potman", Fred Gee, a crooked man with unscrupulous morals, on the soap opera Coronation Street, a role he played from 1975 to 1984. After leaving the soap, he went on to a three-year stint on the BBC1 series All Creatures Great and Small in a minor role.
Feast was not popular with his co-stars, particularly the females, to whom he would boast of his sexual prowess and the immense size of a certain part of his anatomy. He was also (in)famous for ordering large and expensive meals in restaurants and then refusing to pay for them, loudly claiming them to be sub-standard. Anxious to avoid a public scandal with someone so famous, the bill was often waivered, but this scam did nothing to endear him to his superiors at Granada Television, particularly when it made national headlines in the British newspaper The Sun, Fred didn't like his Feast!.[citation needed]Bill Podmore, producer of Coronation Street had to reprimand him on many occasions, re-calling that whenever he did so, Feast would stand before him "...like a naughty schoolboy."
However, more seriously, in 1983, Feast took time off sick at a moment's notice, causing the script writers to have to re-draught 12 episodes (then the equivalent of six weeks of prgrammes.) He claimed to be depressed, had trouble remembering his lines, and suffered from bouts of uncontrollable weeping. Podmore later said that if he had come to him and explained this in the first place, his role could have been temporarily reduced; appearing as a bar person in The Rovers, the focal point of Coronation Street, means that an actor tends to be in more scenes than other characters, and Podmore sympathised with Feast's malaise, but was very angry in the way that he had simply taken time off without consultation.[citation needed]
The next time he took time off, in 1984 it was permanantly. Whether by coincidence or malice on the part of the writers, Fred Gee had gone from being an unlikeable loser to being an outright buffoon, getting the sack from The Rovers from owner Billy Walker after punching him in the face, unable to see that Billy had goaded him into it so he could fire him without having to pay him any redundancy. Business deals behind the back of London textile magnate Mike Baldwin also backfired. It seemed the 'golden age' of the programme, with Annie, Fred, Bet and Betty all at each other's throats was over, when Feast refused to sign a new contract, stating in the British national press that he didn't want to become "...another Coronation Street cabbage", rather cruelly and insensitively referring to several cast members - such as Peter Dudley, Jack Howarth and Bernard Youens, who had all recently died. Podmore was furious over this. Fred Gee was not killed off at that point, he was simply never mentioned again, no indication being given of what had happened to the character. He last appeared in the soap in August 1984.
Some time later, Bill Podmore was holidaying in Jersey when, by the most terrible of coincidences, he ran into Feast, who asked him, in no uncertain terms, when he was going to return to The Street. Podmore replied unequivocally - "Never." Feast always believed that the call to return to the programme would come; it never did. His place at The Rovers was taken by Jack Duckworth (William Tarmey) and the programme now had the same ideal combination of comedy and drama without the problems and complications that Feast had caused.
Bill Podmore in his memoirs: Coronation Street: The Inside Story, writes at length about Feast and his time in the programme, the chapter being headed The Problem Pot-Man. He comes across not so much as angry at Feast as exasperated by him.
Feast later admitted that he regretted leaving the show, his bravado after having resigned long since gone. His character was killed off in Coronation Street just weeks before Feast's own death from abdominal cancer. The news was given to Jack and Vera Duckworth by Fred's ex-wife Eunice (Meg Johnson) that he had passed away, in a manner that was not disclosed. This was very strange, as Fred and Eunice had been divorced for many years. Fans of the programme wanted to know more - had Fred and Eunice got back together? How had he died? It was very frustrating and somewhat pointless...why kill Fred Gee off at this point when most viewers had forgotten him...?[citation needed]
