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.

Patrick Mower - Rough, rogish charmer

In 2010 previous 'treasure' Jan Francis briefly played the love interest of Emmerdale character Rodney Blackstock. Now, I’m no great fan of the soap. I wasn’t even exposed to it until about 2012 when I joined the Milic household and since then I’ve maintained no more than a half-hearted relationship with ITV’s daily saga of everyday rural farmers, gangsters, drug dealers and murderers.   

I’ve paid enough attention to observe that Rodney was and remains a comedy character who seems to flit in and out of scenes without any heavy storylines. Yet my first impression on was disbelief; blimey, it’s only Patrick Mower! 

It brought back vivid memories of the one-time tough guy and Seventies heartthrob. Rodney is a bit of a throwback to that era anyway, wealthy and waltzing through life, trying to relive his youth through sex, drugs and a few nefarious activities. The blow-dried hair may be tinged with steel grey but the broad cheeky grin hasn’t changed. Incredibly he’s now in his eighties!

The Mower I remember wouldn’t have spent much time in a country pub or farm shop. He was usually playing suave spies or all-action cops, and not necessarily likeable ones. I can’t be sure where I first saw him. It could have been in ITV’s impenetrable spy series Callan. Edward Woodward played the eponymous secret agent but Mower and another face of Seventies TV, Anthony Valentine, were regular members of his team. Like many threads from the era, Mower’s ‘dead sheep’ jacket passed the fashion police test but is in severe danger of getting arrested in 2020.

I have stronger memories of Special Branch. It had been launched during the Sixties as a predominantly studio-based drama but it’s the later series which I recall. George Sewell’s DCI Craven and Patrick Mower’s more rough and ready DCI Haggerty were more often found arguing in offices or chasing villains on location and there was enough action to keep this twelve year-old interested. I always felt Haggerty was the perfect name for the character and it wasn’t much of a leap to Hackett, which provided Mower’s first real starring role a few years later in Target.

After Special Branch, Euston Films had ramped up the violence – and popularity amongst teenagers – with The Sweeney. In ’77, the Beeb responded in kind with a new Patrick Mower vehicle. Speaking of vehicles, DSupt Steve Hackett would tear around the Home Counties in Ford Granadas and Transit vans, not to mention his personal Mercury Cougar, before indulging in lots of gratuitous chases and punch-ups. Sadly, being the BBC, the bosses kow-towed to Mary Whitehouse’s tiny but influential bunch of complainers, toning down the action and killing off the show after only two series. Admittedly it wasn’t as compelling as The Sweeney or The Professionals but Patrick Mower was very much the equal, if not the superior of Martin Shaw or Lewis Collins.

It was perhaps ironic that Patrick had in 1975 guest-starred in two of the most memorable episodes of The Sweeney. In ‘Golden Fleece’, he and George Layton played a pair of Aussie armed robbers, whose ‘Nice and easy does it’ theme and easy-going banter enabled them to achieve the impossible and outwit Regan and Carter. They weren’t archetypal Flying Squad baddies. Instead of hard men played by Ronald Lacey, Ken Hutchison or Ian Hendry, they were actually quite wimpy, furthering their careers with corny chat-up lines to make girls swoon and a fine line in light banter. Those, and an arsenal of shotguns and grenades. A few weeks later they showed up again but this time the forces of law and order took revenge. In a classic shootout in a Wapping wasteland, the outnumbered bad boys were finally captured. Was it just me who cheered when they were caught? Viewers were clearly encouraged to admire the loveable rogues but – hang on – they were vicious criminals unafraid to terrorise householders and shoot to kill when cornered…. 

The notion of Patrick Mower the criminal charmer was so strong that in 1981 he evaded another normally infallible detective in the form of Bergerac. No shotguns this time – it was set on Jersey, after all – but he nonetheless contrived to outrun our Jim and bid a cheeky wave from the ferry as it headed away from the quay. He never returned either. Instead he appeared on another island, Rhodes, for a supernatural thriller, Dark Side of the Sun. I know I watched it, but can remember very little.

His stock as a twinkly-eyed, dimpled ladies’ man remained high in the mid-Eighties, endearing him to viewers and marketing men alike. He became a familiar face advertising that once-trendy tipple Babycham and the rather more masculine if mundane Austin Rover cars. Apparently Patrick Mower once said he would never do more than two series in any single role, which brings me back to Emmerdale and Rodney Blackstock, played so far for twenty years. With villainous tendencies and an impudent glint in the eye, it feels like he’s been playing that role forever.