Anthony "Tony" Hirst (born 21 January 1967) is a British actor and theatre director, best known for playing Mike Barnes on the soap opera Hollyoaks and in Coronation Street as Paul Kershaw, the love interest of Eileen Grimshaw. Hirst also narrated the UK version of How It's Made, shown on the Discovery and Quest channels, and various programmes for Channel 4.
Hirst's acting roles include Mike Barnes from Hollyoaks, Martin Gooch from The Ghost Squad and Steve Kingsley from Holby City. He has narrated TV documentaries such as Blueprint for Disaster, 2005, The Garage, Smash Lab, and How It's Made since 1999. He also narrates some of the programme trailers on Fox and Channel 4. Hirst appeared as a fireman called Paul on Coronation Street during the show's 50th anniversary in December 2010. Paul returned to Coronation Street as a regular character during October 2011. It was revealed on 24 February 2013 that Hirst would be leaving Coronation Street in 2013 at the end of his contract. In 2014, Tony Hirst narrated 2 seasons of food factory and in 2015 narrated season 1 of home factory both on Discovery science.
Tony Hirst is an academic in the Department of Computing and Communications at the Open University, but better known for the OUseful Blog on practical applications of open data.
In February 2009, Hirst and colleague Joss Winn, established WriteToReply, to re-publish the UK Government's Digital Britain Interim Report in a way that allowed readers to comment on each paragraph. This was among a number of experiments to promote greater online public participation in government consultations.
In March 2009, Hirst created a technique for extracting and presenting subtitles generated from Twitter status updates in SubRip (*.srt) format
Hirst won the 2011 "Open Up" contest for his ideas about the use of UCAS data. The Open Up contest was run by TSO (formerly "The Stationery Office", a publishing company that supplies the UK Government) and came with a £50,000 development fund to enable the idea. Hirst was chosen by a judging panel headed up by TSO director of digital products Robin Brattel, and included artificial intelligence expert Sir Nigel Richard Shadbolt and Open University director of communications Lucian J Hudson.
Tony Hirst (born 14 June 1945) is a former Australian rules footballer who played with Fitzroy and Melbourne in the Victorian Football League (VFL).