Heartbeat actor’s death is reminder about proper policing values – Yorkshire Post letters

From: Edward Grainger, Botany Way, Nunthorpe, Middlesbrough.
William Simons played Pc Alf ventress in TV's Heartbeat.William Simons played Pc Alf ventress in TV's Heartbeat.
William Simons played Pc Alf ventress in TV's Heartbeat.

YOUR aptly compiled editorial tribute (The Yorkshire Post, June 22 and 24) to the acting talents of William Simons, who had a long and successful career as an 
actor but best remembered for his role as Pc Alf Ventress in all eighteen series of television’s Heartbeat, reminds those who can recall policing as it used to be.

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It seemed that just like in the fictional village of Aidensfield, every police station had the genuine article in the local ‘bobby’ who knew everyone and who had that remarkable 
ability to call up a knowledge of not only people in the area, but instances and events that were all part of a computer-like memory in pursuit of solving all types of crimes.

When I watched my son Neil in several scenes in the only episode that he appeared in, mostly filmed in Goathland, I regret that I didn’t get to meet William Simons.

It was fitting that, even on the set, Pc Ventress was not without a cigarette, something that many of us recall as being a feature of office life in the 1960s, and
thankfully banned some years later.