Star's son on the run

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Adam Barker

Ronnie Barker's son has fled the country after being arrested for alleged child porn offences.

Adam Barker, 38, went on the run just as he was about to be formally charged.

The actor, who is unmarried, was originally detained as part of Operation Ore, the nationwide investigation into child pornography on the internet.

Detectives who raided his home in Ealing are said to have found 1,200 pictures of child pornography on his computer.

The maximum sentence for possession of child pornography is five years. If he was found guilty he would be placed on the sex offenders' register.

As detectives step up the hunt, details of his disappearance have been circulated on the Police National Computer.

It is not known whether he has been in contact with his father, the star of comedy classics such as Porridge, Open All Hours and The Two Ronnies.

Adam Barker's acting career has included appearances in the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies and the romantic comedy Shakespeare In Love. He was originally arrested in June last year by officers of the Metropolitan Police's child abuse investigation team. His name had been on a list of 7,000 suspects passed to UK police by the US postal investigation service after an internet porn ring was smashed. His computer was removed for examination but a backlog of cases meant it was 12 months before the work was completed. After reviewing the case police decided there was enough evidence for a prosecution.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: "A man was bailed to a west London police station until 24 June, 2004. He failed to appear."

Adam Barker was brought up in a large detached house in Pinner, near Harrow, and is the youngest of the Barker family. His sister Charlotte, 42, is an actress, while his brother Larry worked in advertising. He is said to bear a close resemblance to his father and once appeared

with him, as a six-year-old in Open All Hours.

Despite extraordinary success in a host of TV roles, Ronnie Barker was a devoted family man, almost invariably back home by 6pm for dinner with his wife Joy.

Holidays were spent at their house by the sea at Littlehampton in Sussex until fans drove them away.

But Adam Barker did experience some of the glamour of being a comic legend's son. When he was seven he was whisked off to Spain to watch Ronnie play Friar Tuck in a £20million film Robin and Marian, which also starred Audrey Hepburn and Sean Connery.

After leaving school Adam Barker spent a year as a researcher at the BBC before going to York University to study English. There he caught the acting bug. After graduating he took a role as a nerdish prince who failed to get the girl in an Italian film, before appearing in Alan Bennett's stage hit The Madness Of George III.

He also played a policeman in ITV's detective series Wycliffe and has been seen in Monarch Of The Glen and Casualty.

In 1987 Ronnie shocked bosses at the BBC by giving up his £500,000-a-year contract to set up an antiques shop in the Cotswolds.

He had started to suffer from high blood pressure and enjoyed a peaceful retirement, continually turning down offers to return to the small screen.

"It was the best move I ever made," the 75-yearold said recently.

Despite one setback in the antiques world - when Ronnie was conned into buying a stolen cabinet by an inmate on leave who wearing his blue prison uniform - the comedian enjoyed 11 years at the shop in Chipping Norton before selling up in 1999.

He has returned to TV on only a handful of occasions since, making a special Millennium comeback with Ronnie Corbett and doing a series of Pizza adverts.

He also starred alongside another old friend, Albert Finney, in a Winston Churchill TV drama two years ago.

 

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