A number of genuine child actors were featured in the other schoolboy roles in the show, some of whom would gain notice in their subsequent adult careers, including Anthony Valentine, Michael Crawford, Jeremy Bulloch, Melvyn Hayes and Kenneth Cope.

Plans to bring the stories to the cinema screen, featuring the comedian Will Hay as Bunter's form master Henry Samuel Quelch (based on his previous stage and film portrayals as a schoolmaster), had been discussed in the 1930s, but were unrealised.

[4] In May 1951, the BBC Children's Department made public its plans to screen a series of half-hour television shows featuring Billy Bunter as the principal character.

The search for a suitable actor received wide newspaper coverage, with the Daily Mirror covering the auditions both on its front page and in columnist Ian Mackey's 'diary'.

A number of the young actors later carved out successful acting careers as adults, including Anthony Valentine (cast as Lord Mauleverer and, later, as form captain Harry Wharton), Michael Crawford (as Frank Nugent), Jeremy Bulloch (as Bob Cherry), Melvyn Hayes (as the cad Harold Skinner), and Kenneth Cope (as school bully Gerald Loder).

Jonah Barrington, radio critic of the Sunday Chronicle provided the doubled-edged observation that Bunter was the greatest TV character since Muffin the Mule.

The low budget of the production also attracted adverse comment, with reviewers noting a "certain emptiness of the sets" and the fact that the school seemed deserted apart from the principal characters.

It eventually came to an end due only to the death, in December 1961 at the age of 85, of Charles Hamilton, who had created the character of Bunter and who wrote all of the televised scripts over the entire nine years.

Gerald Campion's last ever broadcast in the role of Billy Bunter occurred in July 1994, as part of a BBC Radio 4 series of spoof documentaries examining the careers of famous fictional characters, entitled Whatever Happened To ..., in which Campion appeared as Lord Bunter of Hove in the 4th programme of the series, which examined the later career of Horace Henry Samuel Quelch.

A common source of confusion is that early episodes for which no recording existed were remade by later producers, using different casts,[18] probably due to difficulties in obtaining new scripts from the ailing Charles Hamilton.