Bernard Wrigley is a singer, actor and comedian. He is sometimes known by the nickname "The Bolton Bullfrog".

Wrigley's career as a singer and storyteller began in the late sixties, when a love of folk music

Folk music

Folk music is an English term encompassing both traditional folk music and contemporary folk music. The term originated in the 19th century. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers....

 led him to perform in folk clubs. Since then he has released over sixteen albums of traditional and original songs, stories and monologues. His main instruments are the guitar

Guitar

The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...

 and concertina

Concertina

A concertina is a free-reed musical instrument, like the various accordions and the harmonica. It has a bellows and buttons typically on both ends of it. When pressed, the buttons travel in the same direction as the bellows, unlike accordion buttons which travel perpendicularly to it...

.

He began acting around the same time and has made many appearances on stage, most famously in Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...

's Waiting for Godot

Waiting for Godot

Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for someone named Godot to arrive. Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects of the play, have led to many different interpretations since the play's...

alongside Mike Harding

Mike Harding

Mike Harding is an English singer, songwriter, comedian, author, poet and broadcaster. He is known as 'The Rochdale Cowboy' after one of his hit records...

 at Bolton's Octagon Theatre

Octagon Theatre, Bolton

The Octagon Theatre is a producing theatre located in Bolton, Greater Manchester, England.-Programme:The Octagon produces between eight and nine professional theatre productions a year in its Main Auditorium...

, and Jim Cartwright

Jim Cartwright

Jim Cartwright is an English dramatist, born at Farnworth, Lancashire, England. Cartwright's first play, Road, won a number of awards before being adapted for TV and broadcast by the BBC....

's Road

Road (play)

Road is the first play written by Jim Cartwright, and was first produced in 1986.The play explores the lives of the people in a deprived, working class area of Lancashire during the government of Margaret Thatcher, a time of high unemployment in the north of England...

 at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester.

Wrigley has made many appearances in British TV programmes such as Phoenix Nights

Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights

Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights was a BAFTA-nominated English sitcom about The Phoenix Club, a working men's club in the northern English town of Farnworth, Greater Manchester. The show was written by Neil Fitzmaurice, Peter Kay and Dave Spikey, produced by Goodnight Vienna Productions and Ovation...

(where he was Dodgy Eric, who sold club owner Brian Potter a Das Boot

Das Boot

Das Boot is a 1981 German epic war film written and directed by Wolfgang Petersen, produced by Günter Rohrbach, and starring Jürgen Prochnow, Herbert Grönemeyer, and Klaus Wennemann...

fruit machine, a bucking bronco and an obscene bouncy castle), Emmerdale

Emmerdale

Emmerdale, is a long-running British soap opera set in Emmerdale , a fictional village in the Yorkshire Dales. Created by Kevin Laffan, Emmerdale was first broadcast on 16 October 1972...

(as eccentric rocket inventor Barry Clegg), and his sixth character in Coronation Street

Coronation Street

Coronation Street is a British soap opera set in Weatherfield, a fictional town in Greater Manchester based on Salford. Created by Tony Warren, Coronation Street was first broadcast on 9 December 1960...

(as the Rev. Marvin Winstanley, the dodgy internet priest Roy and Hayley approached to arrange their wedding). Further credits include Last of the Summer Wine

Last of the Summer Wine

Last of the Summer Wine is a British sitcom written by Roy Clarke that was broadcast on BBC One. Last of the Summer Wine premiered as an episode of Comedy Playhouse on 4 January 1973 and the first series of episodes followed on 12 November 1973. From 1983 to 2010, Alan J. W. Bell produced and...

, Cold Feet

Cold Feet

Cold Feet is a British comedy-drama television series produced by Granada Television for the ITV network. The series was created and principally written by Mike Bullen as a follow-up to his award-winning 1997 Comedy Premiere of the same name. The storyline follows three couples experiencing the...

, Coogan's Run

Coogan's Run

Coogan's Run was a 1995 UK TV series featuring Steve Coogan as a series of odd characters living in the fictional town of Ottle. It was written by various people including Coogan, Patrick Marber, David Tyler, Graham Linehan, Arthur Mathews, Geoffrey Perkins and Henry Normal...

, Victoria Wood

Victoria Wood

Victoria Wood CBE is a British comedienne, actress, singer-songwriter, screenwriter and director. Wood has written and starred in sketches, plays, films and sitcoms, and her live stand-up comedy act is interspersed with her own compositions, which she accompanies on piano...

's dinnerladies

Dinnerladies

Dinnerladies is a British sitcom written, co-produced by and starring Victoria Wood. It ran on BBC One for 16 episodes from 1998 to 2000.-Plot:...

, Victoria Wood With All The Trimmings

Victoria Wood with All The Trimmings

Victoria Wood with All The Trimmings was a one-off Christmas comedy sketch show special written by and starring comedienne Victoria Wood. It was broadcast on BBC1 on Christmas Day 2000....

 and In With The Flynns

In with the Flynns

In with the Flynns is a British sitcom created by Caryn Mandabach, produced by Caryn Mandabach Productions, and broadcast by the BBC. The first series began broadcast on 8 June 2011 for six episodes on BBC One and in high definition on BBC One HD in the United Kingdom...

. He also appeared as a union official in Brassed Off

Brassed Off

Brassed Off is a 1996 British film written and directed by Mark Herman. The film, a British-American co-production made between Channel Four Films, Miramax Films and Prominent Films, is about the troubles faced by a colliery brass band, following the closure of their pit...

and as a school teacher in Rita, Sue and Bob Too

Rita, Sue and Bob Too

Rita, Sue and Bob Too is a 1986 British film directed by Alan Clarke about two West Yorkshire teenaged schoolgirls who have a sexual fling with a married man. It was adapted by Andrea Dunbar, based on two of her stage plays; Rita Sue and Bob Too and The Arbor...

, and in 1978 he was a night school teacher in Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett is a British playwright, screenwriter, actor and author. Born in Leeds, he attended Oxford University where he studied history and performed with The Oxford Revue. He stayed to teach and research mediaeval history at the university for several years...

's play Me—I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

On national BBC Radio 4

BBC Radio 4

BBC Radio 4 is a British domestic radio station, operated and owned by the BBC, that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. The station controller is currently Gwyneth Williams, and the...

 he has acted in plays from 15 to 90 minutes. BBC Radio Lancashire

BBC Radio Lancashire

BBC Radio Lancashire is the BBC Local Radio service for the county of Lancashire, in North West England. It began as BBC Radio Blackburn on 26 January 1971 on 96.4FM, then adding 854 kHz AM in 1972 and changing to its current name on 4 July 1981...

 has seen many of his pre-recorded series such as "Wrigley's Ramblings", "Home Brewed" and readings of many stories written by the late great author from Bury - Tommy Thompson

Tommy Thompson

Thomas George "Tommy" Thompson , a United States Republican politician, was the 42nd Governor of Wisconsin, after which he served as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. Thompson was a candidate for the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election, but dropped out early after a poor performance in polls...

.

As a writer he has released various combinations of his songs and monologues. In 2006 he produced a book of silly one verse poems Shorts For All Occasions, to be followed in 2008 by The Longs and the Shorts of it.

Discography

• The Phenomenal B. Wrigley (1971)
• Rough and Wrigley (1974)
• Songs, Stories, & Elephants (1976)
• Ten Ton Special (1976)
• The Bolton Bullfrog (1981)
• Rude Bits! (1985)
• The Instrumental Album (1988)
• Wanted: Live! (1991)
• Buggerlugs (1992)
• Albert, Arthur, & The Car Park (1997)
• Magnificent Monologues (2000)
• Fairly Truthful Tales (2002)
• Magnificent Monologues Volume 2 (2002)
• Monologology (2003)
• Amblethwaite 'Appenings (2004)
• God's Own County (2005)
• Every Song Tells A Story (2009)

External links