Bernard Cribbins is completing the Telegraph crossword when I arrive. He looks up. "What bloody time d'you call this?" I apologise. He grins. He knows the trains have been delayed at Waterloo. "Six down, enzyme, must be. Bobobobobom, bobobobobom," he sings, to no recognisable tune. It's a brute of a summer's day, and Cribbins' pink shirt is sweat-patched, and there's a rivulet dripping from his forehead. He has a full head of white hair, a beard like brambles and a crippling handshake.
He is 85 now and industrious as ever. This week, appropriately enough, he stars in the first CBeebies Prom as Old Jack, eponymous hero of the BBC show Old Jack's Boat. Appropriate because no actor has done more for children's drama than Cribbins. His CV of grownup work is formidable: the horrific Mr Hutchinson in Fawlty Towers; the belligerent barman in Hitchcock's Frenzy; a starring role as Nathan Detroit in Richard Eyre's Guys and Dolls at the National Theatre; camping it up with Kenneth Williams in the Carry On films; crooking it up alongside Peter Sellers in Two-Way Stretch. Then there are the hit singles he had in the early 1960s. But it is his work for children that most of us remember: voicing every character in the Wombles; a record number of Jackanory appearances; station porter Albert Perks in the enduring Railway Children; two stints in Doctor Who almost 50 years apart; and now Old Jack's Boat in which he sits with Salty, his gorgeous Hungarian wire-haired vizsla, and tells stories.
Nobody tells a story quite like Cribbins – even when he's holding back on the crucial details. Today, he's getting animated about his and Salty's forthcoming gig, and the dog's wage packet. "There'll be me and the dog, and I'll sing the song once I've learned the bloody words. I guarantee when I come on everybody will shout, 'Salteeee!' They won't be concerned with me, they'll be looking at the dog. Brilliant, she's terrific, yes. She's a hunt point retrieve. HPR. Go on, jot that down. It means they get a whiff of a bird or rabbit, and they'll point. She probably gets paid more a week than you do. I'm not going to tell you because it's controversial. It's a few quid, I'll tell you. No, no nope, you won't get it out of me. She gets just under what I get. Ha ha! They're very well paid, trained animals."
He's been in showbusiness 71 years now. Cribbins was 13 when he left school in Oldham, a couple of weeks short of his 14th birthday in the Christmas holidays. "They said he needn't come back, get rid of the bugger, y'know." Did he like school? "I always say we used to learn how to throw half-bricks at our school. You know, running about and being silly. Fighting. School was all right, but I was quite happy to go to work, I must say."
Cribbins had been in school plays, and his potential was spotted by a local producer. "I started working at Oldham rep on January 4, 1943," he says with military precision. "Fifteen bob for a 70-hour week. That's 75p now. Looking back, it was outrageously underpaid, even for a 14-year-old." He gave his wages straight to his cotton-weaver mother (his odd-job-man father was a jack of all trades called Jack), who gave him back a half crown to pay for the tram. Weekly rep was wonderful – and monstrous. "Doing Hamlet in a week, and in the meantime you're learning next week's. Shouldn't happen." The discipline prepared him for his national service, spent in Palestine and Germany as a paratrooper.
Cribbins and Wilfred Mott, the character he played in Doctor Who, share significant biographical details. Cribbins would natter away to writer Russell T Davies about his time in the military, then find himself speaking his own words in the show. "I was telling him about being on an observation point Christmas 1947 on a flat roof in Haifa, with a greatcoat on because it was so cold, snow, and all sorts of shit flying about. BOOM! Cheeeewphwoooow! Ppprrrrooo! So I mention this to Russell T, and next thing I know I'm telling that story to the Doctor, hurtling along in the spaceship."
Back in Oldham after national service, he was unsure what to do with himself. "I went to the theatre, still in uniform, and outside there was a tall, good-looking young man called Eric Sykes, also from Oldham, and he said, 'What are you going to do?' And I said, 'I am thinking of coming back to the theatre, but I might try variety.' And he said [bangs the table], 'I've got an act for you', and straightaway in the middle of Fairbottom Street, he started doing this sketch of a one-legged darts player. Classic Eric. Total clowning. Lovely man he was. Hehehe!"
Sure enough Cribbins successfully combined variety with the rep, where he met his future wife, Gill, who was working as an assistant stage manager. Cribbins could sing and dance a bit, had natural comic timing, a way with double entendres and a fabulously malleable face. In the early 1960s, George Martin, then an A&R man for Parlophone scouting comic talent, andonly months away from producing the Beatles, decided Cribbins had a future in the recording industry. He hooked him up with a couple of writers and, before Cribbins knew it, he was a pop star of sorts. His two hit singles were macabre blue-collar narratives – The Hole in the Ground is a monologue about a road worker arguing with a bowler-hatted gent who believes the hole is the wrong shape. At the end of the song, Cribbins reveals that the hole is now filled "and beneath it is the bloke in the bowler hat". Right Said Fred is the story about three fellas moving a piano, and concludes with Fred's death.
Did he enjoy his time in the charts? "That was great fun, that. Noël Coward chose Hole in the Ground as his favourite on Desert Island Discs. 'Which one would you take if you could only have one?' 'I would take Hole in the Ground,'" he says in a perfectly starched Coward voice. "'Why is that?' 'I could walk up and down the beach translating it into French.'" He slaps his thigh. "I never met the gentleman. But I was in a traffic jam in Parliament Square once, and a limo pulled up alongside and he was sitting in the back seat, and I wanted to get out and say it's me, it's Hole in the Ground." He switches to Coward again: "Yes, of course it is! Go away!'"
His gift for mimickry helped him in children's drama. Why employ a cast of thousands when Cribbins could do a job lot for you? Hence the Wombles, which he adored, particularly Madame Cholet. "I think Bulgaria was having it off with her, you see. I'm sure they were."
It's as gruff, caring Albert Perks in The Railway Children that we see why children are so fond of him. Is that a fair assessment of his own character? "Caring?" He gives it some thought. "Yes I am quite caring, I think." I ask for five words to describe him. "The first word that comes to mind is impatient. Impatient, caring, perfectionist, sentimental, loyal. There you go."
Why does The Railway Children appeal to generation after generation of children? "'I don't call that kids stuff really. It's for everybody and very much adult in places. Emotionally." Does it makes him cry? "The only time there's a gulp is when Jenny [Agutter] does 'Daddy, my daddy', and if you don't gulp there you've not been listening." Is he an emotional man? 'I can be, yeah. I can have a gulp."One of the things he's most proud of is his 114 appearances on Jackanory. "It was absolutely brilliant. It introduced young children to classics like Alice in Wonderland. There's far too much CGI and fast editing with children's TV now. All the bells and fireworks are distracting. There's a massive amount to be said for sitting down and saying" – he points a finger and whispers me back to childhood – "'Come here, come here, let me talk to you, did you know ...' And you're immediately going what, what?"
We talk about what makes him a good storyteller. "Well, I think I'm a good actor, without being boastful. I have an array of voices. And intensity is a word you might use. Engage with that little figure on the other side of the lens."
Perhaps it's also your childlike imagination, I say. At 85, is he still immature? "No, I'm very mature. Have you seen my knees?" He had them replaced two years ago, and the new ones cause him agonies. "They hurt all the time. Big lumps of metal in there. Oh God, they're hard as anything. Feel your own knee. Then feel that." Sure enough, they are forbiddingly steely.
Cribbins and Gill will celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary next year. Do they have children? "No, no, we haven't," he says, before quickly changing the subject. "But you see I was so lucky with the stories I was given to read. Alice in Wonderland has got a cast of thousands, so you can do as many funny voices as you want. It's a wonderful show-off." Would they have liked children? "We never managed any, that was all. Always a regret if you think you might like a family."
But he's not complaining. He and Gill have a great relationship, the job offers keep coming in, and he loves his work. Are many of his contemporaries still working? "I don't know," he says. "I'm just trying to think. I think most of them are dead." Does that depress him? "Noooah! No, that's what happens."
Is there anything he set his heart on that he's failed to achieve? "I did think of becoming a ballet dancer at one point. I had a girlfriend who was teaching in the ballet school. I was 16, 17, very fit, but it was too much like hard work." Cribbins accepts that, since he now has metal knees, the ballet dream is probably over. But you can't have everything, and he's got no intention of retiring, couldn't bear the idea. After all, he's not even a nonagenarian yet. Does he work for the money? "No, just love. I do it for the money as well, obviously. It's my job, I like working, I've done it since I was 14. It's a great habit."
• The CBeebies Prom is on Saturday and Sunday at 11am. Details: bbc.co.uk/proms
