Kent Walton

Kent Walton (22 August 1917 – 24 August 2003), born Kenneth Walton Beckett, was a British television sports commentator, presenter and actor. He is best remembered as the predominant commentator on

ITV's coverage of British professional wrestling

from 1955 to 1988.

Early life

Despite a

transatlantic accent which led many to believe he was Canadian, he was born in Cairo, Egypt, the son of the finance minister in the colonial government. He grew up at Haslemere in Surrey and was educated at Charterhouse

.

He attended the

rep. On the outbreak of war in 1939, he joined the Royal Air Force, serving in Bomber Command

as a radio operator and front gunner. He acquired his accent mixing with Canadian airmen.

Sports commentator

After the end of the war he returned to acting before commentating on

Queen Mother and Margaret Thatcher, enthusiasm was not shared by ITV's Head of Sport, Greg Dyke, and in 1988 he dropped the sport, a blow from which the traditional British style of the sport, although it has survived to the present, has never fully recovered.^[1]

Presenter

Walton was a

Cool for Cats from 1956 to 1961, then Discs A Gogo for TWW Television from 1961 to 1965. In the early sixties, he also acted as a judge on Thank Your Lucky Stars

on ITV.

Producer

In the early 1970s, he was involved with British

sexploitation movies and is credited as a producer of such films as Clinic Exclusive, aka Clinic Xclusive, aka With These Hands (1971). A co-founder of Pyramid Films, he jointly used a pseudonym, Elton Hawke, with his business partner Hazel Adair, the co creator of the soap opera Crossroads.^[2] He used other pseudonyms to keep this part of his life from gaining public attention, but it was revealed in a 1975 episode of the TV documentary series Man Alive

.