Norman Painting, the longest-serving actor in Radio 4′s The Archers, has died aged 85. Mark Andrews looks back on a long career – and the actor’s thoughts about growing old.

Norman Painting was philosophical about his own mortality. At the age of 84, in failing health and confined to a wheelchair, he chuckled as he recalled the words of a friend, now dead, when he was about to have a heart bypass.

She said: “I hope it all goes well and, if it doesn’t, I suppose we’ll hear all about it on television, won’t we?”

That was almost exactly a year ago. The actor, who played the role of Ambridge patriarch Phil Archer in the hit radio series The Archers, was about to be honoured in Birmingham’s walk of stars.

“I always used to apologise for being 5ft 6in instead of 6ft 3in, handsome and sunburnt,” he said with a grin. “I don’t exist and Ambridge doesn’t exist and yet people have a very clear picture of what we are like.”

It is not really surprising that people felt they knew Phil, though. Painting’s 59 years in the role, a world record in broadcasting, makes Bill Roache, who has played Coronation Street’s Ken Barlow, since 1960, looked something of a young whippersnapper by comparison. Not that he ever expected it.

“I didn’t think we’d still be going in 1950,” he said. “I remember some discussions in the early days when we wondered whether we’d get another three-month contract.”

Painting died on Wednesday night at the age of 85. He was diagnosed with bladder cancer several years ago, and more recently he suffered from heart problems. Wheelchair-bound, his appearances in The Archers gradually became more limited, but he continued to live alone in his large Warwickshire house.

“Four years ago I went on record as saying I had never been so contented in my life. But that’s not true now,” he told the Express & Star’s Peter Rhodes in October last year.

“The nearest shop is eight miles away and although I have a swimming pool, I cannot use it. Life is not as idyllic as I had hoped it would be.” Just months earlier he had suffered a fall at home, and lay for hours on his floor before managing to get to his phone.

“I fell with this terrible crack and I lay there from after midnight until 9.10 the next morning.

“I could not remember my name or where I was and I thought, Oh Lord, what is going to happen? And yet there was absolutely no trauma. You know, it is strange but I was not in the least scared.”

When Painting first appeared in the farming series, in the fictitious Midland county of Borsetshire in 1950, Phil was a young man in his 20s, who clashed with his father Dan about the benefits of modern agricultural methods. And like Phil, who took a back seat on the farm in his later years, Painting also found he had to take life at a slower pace in his old age.

“I used to be a human dynamo,” he sighed. “I never used to take stairs one at a time. I never realised it would come to this. I am more or less in a wheelchair. I occasionally get this old-age depression and I’ve had a couple of falls.”

And just as Phil, as he grew older, became more sceptical about the changes in agriculture, Painting himself seemed to grow weary about the pace of change. When the soap moved from the BBC’s Pebble Mill studios in Edgbaston to the new Mailbox complex in central Birmingham, the actor was not impressed.

“It is the world’s most evil building,” said Painting. “It is so unfriendly. It thinks it’s in Las Vegas, virtually open to the elements.”

The actor was born in Leamington Spa, the son of a railway signalman and a coalminer’s daughter. He left school at 15 to work in a library, and two years later he was called up for National Service, but failed the medical. Instead he enrolled at Birmingham University, where he read English, and worked his way through his studies by registering as a fire-watcher for which, if he signed on before 7pm, he got 4s 6d, his supper and a bed for the night in the warden’s shelter.

He graduated from Birmingham with a first-class honours degree, and went on to Christ Church, Oxford, with a research scholarship and immediately joined the university dramatic society. He toured the US in a student production of King Lear, starring Peter Parker, later chairman of British Rail, as Lear, and Shirley Catlin, the future politician Shirley Williams, as Cordelia.

He worked for a short while as a lecturer at Exeter College, but was headhunted by Dennis Morris, then controller of the BBC’s Light Programme, as a scriptwriter, producer and actor.

Then in early 1950, Godfrey Baseley, a senior BBC producer, suggested his academic background might come in useful collating the agricultural facts for a new radio programme to be called The Archers of Wimberton Farm.

He never married, possibly influenced by his less than idyllic home life as a child.

“I grew up in a very unhappy marriage. I loved my father and mother but they didn’t care much for each other. They stayed together for the sake of the children.”

And despite finding life increasingly difficult in this twilight years, he retained his dry, mischievous sense of humour.

“My speciality is sounding chipper and looking a million dollars, usually when I’m feeling at death’s door and thinking I won’t see the day out.”