Stuart Organ, actor best known as Mr Robson, headmaster of Grange Hill – obituary
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Organ, who has died aged 72, played Grange Hill’s longest-running character, Mr Robson, the teacher who rises to become head in the groundbreaking BBC television soap about a London comprehensive school.
Ruffling feathers with its stories of bullying, drugs and teenage pregnancy, the programme was its creator Phil Redmond’s attempt to move away from the “Enid Blyton, middle-class drama” previously seen on TV.
In 1988, 10 years after its launch, Peter Robson arrived as a PE and geography teacher. Within five years, he was deputy head, then, in 1998, headteacher.
His early days in charge coincided with a period of violence. A new pupil, Sean Pearce, brought a knife into school and slashed Judi Jeffreys’s face, leaving her permanently scarred. Judi then died falling from a height while fleeing a fire started by Sean.
Following the 2003 series – five years before the programme was axed – Organ left after more than 260 episodes because of production switching from London to Liverpool, the base for Redmond’s other long-running soap, Hollyoaks.
That year also saw the end of Brookside, which Redmond had created 21 years earlier to reflect life in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s and provide an antidote to what he saw as the cosiness of Coronation Street.
Before becoming a cornerstone of Grange Hill, Organ appeared in Brookside on and off (1984-89) as Kevin Cross. The character would turn up in the Liverpool close for visits to his father, the grumpy pensioner Harry, and mother, Edna, whose garden gnomes were both a source of humour and objects of vandalism.
Harry initially disapproved of Kevin’s relationship with his partner, Sally Haynes, a divorcee, but the hostility ended after Edna’s death and the news that Harry was to become a granddad. His losing his temper after Sally refused to move next door sent her into premature labour and the baby died.
Later, Harry went to live with the couple in St Helens – but, suffering dementia in 1999, returned briefly to the close. Organ was back for a final appearance, too, with Kevin arriving to take Harry home.
Stuart Adrian Organ was born in Bromley, Kent, on November 8 1951, to Gwendolen (née Spreckley) and Harold Organ, an accountant. He attended Cranbrook School and, while studying for an MA in drama at Leeds University, played the Marquis de Sade in Marat/Sade at the Young Vic, London, as part of the 1975 National Student Drama Festival.
After appearing at Leeds Playhouse in productions such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1976), he had small roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre (1979-80) before playing Charles Bingley in Pride and Prejudice at the Old Vic (1986) and Bob Phillips in the Alan Ayckbourn play How the Other Half Loves (Duke of York’s Theatre, 1988).
Organ made his screen debut in the television film Those Glory Glory Days (1983) as a member of Tottenham Hotspur’s League and FA Cup double-winning 1960-61 football squad.
Then came parts as Corporal Turner in the first series of the English Civil War drama By the Sword Divided (1983) and Bazin, fatefully assigned to hunt a dragon, in the 1987 Doctor Who adventure “Dragonfire”.
Later, Organ played a flasher in This Life (in 1996), the stalker of PC Sam Nixon in The Bill (in 2003, among five different roles in the programme) and Len Parker in the 2004 and 2005 series of the comedy-drama Down to Earth.
For the first two runs of Secret Diary of a Call Girl (2007-08), he and Toyah Willcox played the parents of Billie Piper’s character, unaware of how she earned a living.
Organ’s later stage roles included the spy Guy Burgess in An Englishman Abroad (Theatre Royal, York, 2003) and a dodgy major-cum-hired assassin in Corpse (Queens Theatre, Hornchurch, 2007).
Alongside voicing many animated films, TV series and video games, he was familiar to London Underground passengers announcing Tube train information and warning them to “mind the gap”.
Organ is survived by his wife, Julia (née Kehoe), whom he married in 2002.
Stuart Organ, born November 8 1951, died February 15 2024
