Geoffrey Palmer - TV's Greatest Grump

When it comes to a lugubrious demeanour and laconic devil-may-care middle-class drawl, Geoffrey Palmer takes the biscuit. He is a shortbread, rich tea and Hob-Nob all wrapped up in one single, perfect package. Narrating BBC2’s tongue-in-cheek Noughties documentary series Grumpy Old Men was a role he was surely born to play. He is on record as saying: “I am not grumpy, I just look this way”, but that’s all you need in the acting business. If I’ve ever seen him crack a smile, that moment of magic is long forgotten. 

In the ‘60s he played a variety of senior cops, professors, lawyers and doctors, and such roles seemed to follow throughout his career. I probably first saw him, like so many familiar character actors, in series such as Z Cars and Doctor Who but it was as a physician that I definitely watched him in The Liver Birds, Fawlty Towers and, a few years earlier, Colditz. 

In the wartime drama, he may only have been a minor role but it was an important one, especially in the gut-wrenching 1972 episode when Michael Bryant’s prisoner character Wing Commander Marsh attempted to escape by feigning madness. Even my eleven year-old self was emotionally gripped when Marsh immersed himself so deeply that his mental health deteriorated for real.                                                            

Nevertheless it was in comedy roles that he made his name in the Seventies. For me the name Geoffrey Palmer first entered my vocabulary during the first run of The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin in ’76. I’ll never forget Leonard Rossiter’s tour-de-force in the lead role over three series but two other characters ran him close for laughs and catchphrases. John Barron’s stereotypical boss CJ didn’t get where he was today without belittling his employees, then there was Reggie’s brother-in-law Jimmy, played by Palmer. His Farage-like determination to lead Britain back to some kind of right-wing utopia was matched only by his staccato phrases and sheer incompetence, prompting his catchphrase “Bit of a cock-up on the  …front”. He also delivered one of the funniest monologues in sitcom history, a definite grumpy old man in the making. 

Rossiter died suddenly in 1984, but the character of Jimmy lived on, sort of. Reggie Perrin writer David Nobbs wrote Fairly Secret Army for Channel 4, so had to subtly change Jimmy to Harry, although his traits and politics were basically the same. It wasn’t as funny but Geoffrey Palmer was appropriately inept and stiff-upper-lipped. 

TV comedy in the Seventies and Eighties enjoyed a whole raft of supporting actors from which to call upon to play the stodgy officer-class stooge to funny men like Terry Scott, Eric Sykes, Richard Briers, Dick Emery, Benny Hill, Michael Crawford’s Frank Spencer and so on. Reginald Marsh, Geoffrey Chater, Richard Wattis, Allan Cuthbertson and Henry McGee were undoubted masters of the part but Geoffrey Palmer possessed a touch more star quality, even on the 1982 Kenny Everett Christmas Show. In particular, his cameo as General Haig in the climactic episode of Blackadder Goes Forth was absolutely spot-on. 

By this time, he was a regular in more significant sitcom roles. I don’t think he actually uttered “Cock-up on the catering front” in relation to his screen wife Ria’s notorious attempts at cooking but as the long–suffering Ben in Butterflies the fifty-something Geoffrey Palmer finally moved into new territory. As usual, Carla Lane’s star was a woman, the redoubtable Wendy Craig, but much of the humour came from Ben’s dry comments and his relationship with the two sons, including a young Nicholas Lyndhurst. 

I often found Carla Lane’s sitcoms uneasy viewing, with too many words and main characters I struggled to warm to. Maybe it was because I’m a bloke, maybe not, but nonetheless the first few series of Butterflies were essential viewing. Also in the ‘80s Geoffrey switched to ITV for a few series written by the prolific Renwick/Marshall partnership. You don’t have to have watched it to imagine him as the Foreign Secretary in Whoops Apocalypse then he was the newspaper editor shafted by the brash Robert Hardy in Hot Metal. I didn’t tune in every week but I remember feeling sorry for his character. 

For many, it’s his part opposite Judi Dench in As Time Goes By for which he’s most fondly remembered. The humour was a bit wistful and gentle for my liking but I know Mum liked it for those very reasons. Palmer was well into his seventies when the series ended in 2005 but the scenes always seemed to be him and Dench just sitting on a sofa reminiscing, so not exactly physically arduous. 

The wry deadpan delivery was ideal for situation or sketch comedy but that military bearing has also held him in good stead for crime drama over the decades. The parts always seemed alike, be they in The Professionals, Inspector Morse or Bergerac. In 2008 he had a cameo playing Lord Scarman visiting a mistrustful Gene Hunt’s cop shop in Ashes to Ashes but he seemed to be on auto-pilot, doing what he does so well. 

However, for all his memorable roles on screen, one of his most enduring contributions to television history came in the Eighties and Nineties when his face was hidden. From 1986 he became the voice of Audi in their TV adverts. Even now I can’t see the words ‘Vorsprung Durch Technik’ without hearing that lovely laconic voice. Thierry Henry may have injected some va-va-voom into the car commercial sector but it’s Geoffrey Palmer OBE whose vocal engine purrs to perfection.