Yet he found himself continually frustrated by what he saw as the BBC’s refusal to take risks. “I’d say, ‘Let’s do a documentary for kids about flying, I’ll provide you with everything you need [Griffiths is a vintage aeroplane enthusiast and back then was a qualified pilot]. They would mutter, ‘But, oh dear, what about the insurance?’. And I would say, ‘Come on. Come on. Pull yourselves together.’ But they were all on excellent pensions at the BBC and they were worried that, if they fouled up, they would lose them.”
Nor, he says, would they ever tell their best-loved performers how much the public adored them. “It took a girl who worked in the office to tell me that I got thousands of letters each week, asking for more of my songs, for me to do more mimes. But they never told you that, in case you asked for more money, or decided to go to the commercial side.”
Eventually, Griffiths did leave, frustrated by the budget constraints, and was immediately snapped up by Granada (although he continued to appear sporadically in Look and Read).
Did he ever experience racism? “The only time I remember it in TV was when I was asked to do a commercial for Kraft cheese in the 1970s, which was unheard of for a black person at that time. Because Kraft was owned by an American subsidiary, it got pulled because they weren’t sure about having a black guy in an advert. If there was racism elsewhere I didn’t really notice it. Although I did used to say in interviews – well, you know, I won’t ever be appearing in a Noël Coward.”
Except he did: in 1999, he gave a highly acclaimed performance in Nude with Violin at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre, a venue at which he worked regularly for nearly 40 years.
“Things have definitely changed. I remember as a kid seeing a wall plastered with the words Keep Britain White. But you either curled up into a darkened room or you put your best foot forward and carried on,” he says. To be honest, after the war everyone was getting it – the Jews, the Germans, the West Indians. You learned to gloss over it.”
Griffiths is now 76, and still active, often popping up on the small screen, including a stint in Coronation Street in 2016, and joining the cast of The Mousetrap when it became the first West End show to open after lockdown. He’s pretty guarded about his private life and when I ask if he has children himself he says, “Yes, from a long time ago” but resists giving further details. Yet it’s clear he adores performing for them. He deplores the lack of investment these days in children’s TV.
“The budgets have gone, so the class has gone. And children are much the poorer for it,” he says. “There’s still some lovely stuff out there, but I’d love for a TV company to give a big budget to someone like Steven Spielberg and see what he can come up with. It’s easy for me to say it’s not like the old days. But it bloody well isn’t.”
‘The Third Man’ is now at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London SE1; menierchocolatefactory.com