Geoffrey Palmer: Actor who turned boring characters into compelling viewing

Geoffrey Palmer, who has died aged 93, was an actor with a hangdog expression that made him perfect for television sitcoms, coming to the fore in the 1970s after a decade of mostly supporting roles in dramas.

“I’ve done an awful lot of work where I look pretty miserable,” he said. “Taxi drivers are always going, ‘Come on, mate, it’s not that bad!’ I think it’s just the jowls and the sagging face, but I’m not miserable all the time.”

Palmer had a skill for making “dull” characters compelling, as in As Time Goes By (1992-2005), written by Bob Larbey from an idea by Colin Bostock-Smith. He and Judi Dench starred as a couple rekindling the flames of a romance past – Lionel Hardcastle, a crotchety divorcee, and Jean Pargetter, a widow.

An army officer-turned-coffee planter, Lionel was seen struggling to find enthusiasm for anything, in contrast to his father, Rocky (played by Frank Middlemass), who marries country and western-loving Madge (Joan Sims).

It was as another militaristic character on the BBC that Palmer first made his mark in sitcom. With a supporting role as Jimmy Anderson in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976-79), he played the buffoon of a brother-in-law to Leonard Rossiter’s title character, a middle-aged suburbanite executive at Sunshine Desserts who fakes his own suicide and reappears in a different guise, starting a thriving new business, Grot.

Jimmy, who joins Grot as head of creative thinking after a lifetime of failure, speaks in clipped military jingo and scrounges meals and groceries on visits to his sister, Reggie’s wife, with a limp excuse that became his catchphrase: “Bit of a cock-up on the catering front.”

Palmer confessed: “It took me ages to get into the part of Jimmy. At first, I couldn’t get to grips with the strange, telegrammatic delivery – but that catchphrase really did take off.”

The actor’s larger-than-life portrayal inspired the sitcom’s writer, David Nobbs, to plan a sequel based around the character, but the BBC turned it down. With a few adjustments, the writer switched to Channel 4 and Palmer brought Harry Kitchener Wellington Truscott, a penniless, divorced former major, to life in Fairly Secret Army (1984-86).

Truscott, once of the Queen’s Own West Mercian Lowlanders, was a right-wing fanatic who forms his own private army to defend his country against the loony left, wets, anarchists and feminists.

In contrast, Palmer was again in boring mode for his best other comedy role, as Ben Parkinson, a dentist who collects butterflies for a hobby, in Butterflies (1978-83). Written by Carla Lane, the programme featured Wendy Craig as Palmer’s dissatisfied wife, Ria. The series followed their humdrum existence and Ben’s irritation with their two teenage sons’ cynical, light-hearted approach to life.

Geoffrey Dyson Palmer was born in London in 1927 to Norah (nee Robins) and Frederick Palmer, a chartered surveyor, and attended Highgate School, where he said he was “beaten fairly regularly” for talking in class “or, believe it or not, being too exuberant”.

After serving in the Royal Marines, he worked in an exports office, then in a friend’s father’s accountancy firm, while performing with an amateur dramatics company.

This led him to become an unpaid trainee assistant stage manager at the Q Theatre, in Brentford, for 18 months. Then, he turned professional and landed the same job with Croydon’s Grand Theatre, where he started getting small acting parts.

When television beckoned, Palmer found himself frequently cast in authority roles, as police officers, doctors and military types. Alongside many one-off appearances in dramas, he was a regular in Family Solicitor (1961) as Hugh Cowley, a junior partner in the law practice of Naylor and Freeman.

Early signs of Palmer’s talent for comedy were displayed when he had runs playing an assortment of soldiers in The Army Game (between 1958 and 1960) and police officers in its spin-off, Bootsie and Snudge (1960-63).

Before deciding that he preferred television to the stage, he enjoyed acclaim for his role as Edward, the pathologist son-in-law of Ralph Richardson’s writer lamenting Britain’s loss of empire, in the world premiere of John Osborne’s play West of Suez, at the Royal Court Theatre in 1971. By the following decade, having established his comedy credentials, he was back there to star in the Alan Bennett play Kafka’s Dick (1986).

In between, he had parts in the West End, including Victor in Noel Coward’s comedy of manners Private Lives (Globe Theatre, 1974), as well as playing eligible bachelor Geoffrey Farrant in JB Priestley’s parlour piece Eden End in a National Theatre production at the Old Vic (1974), directed by Laurence Olivier.

Palmer’s other TV sitcom starring roles included Leo Bannister, a husband in a disharmonious marriage, in The Last Song (1981-83); the foreign secretary in Whoops Apocalypse (1982); Donald Stress in the first series of Executive Stress (1986); managing editor Harold Stringer in the newspaper saga Hot Metal (1986-89); and Donald Savage in The Savages (2001).

In 1996, Palmer revived Jimmy Anderson in The Legacy of Reginald Perrin (1996), a series set in the wake of Reggie’s funeral. He also appeared in three Doctor Who stories (in 1970, 1972 and 2007).

His occasional film roles included two establishment figures in O Lucky Man! (1973), a headteacher in Clockwise (1986), a judge in A Fish Called Wanda (1988), Dr Warren, the Prince of Wales’s physician, in The Madness of King George (1994), Sir Henry Ponsonby in Mrs Brown (1997), Admiral Roebuck, M’s adviser, in the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and the head geographer in the first Paddington movie (2014).

His distinctive voice was heard advocating “vorsprung durch technik” in Audi car commercials and as narrator of the TV documentary series Grumpy Old Men (2003-06) and Grumpy Old Holidays (2006). He was made OBE in 2005.

Palmer is survived by his wife, Sally (nee Green), whom he married in 1963, and their two children, Charlie, a television director, and Harriet.

Geoffrey Palmer, actor, born 4 June 1927, died 5 November 2020