Television industryObituaryHugh Lloyd
A much-loved comedy actor, he went on to more serious rolesPerky and cheeky, or lugubrious and sad, Hugh Lloyd, who has died aged 85, was for more than 50 years one of Britain's best-loved comedy actors, working as a partner with some of the funniest television comedians of the age and ruling the roost as chief comic in numerous seaside shows and pantomimes.
Two years after his first radio programme, the Stay at Home Show, Lloyd made his television debut in 1950 in the Centre Show, broadcast for troops. He found wider fame in a variety of roles with the inspired but tragic comedian Tony Hancock, taking incidental roles in the BBC television version of Hancock's Half Hour throughout the 1950s. In 1961 the programme's title was shortened to Hancock, and Lloyd was a fellow patient in one of the best-remembered of the series, The Blood Donor. Then he was consigned to the outer darkness by the self-centred Hancock - whose inner demons led him to suicide in 1968 - before getting his own series, Hugh and I, with Terry Scott. Its 69 episodes, with Lloyd the down-to-earth foil to the excitable Scott, ran from 1962 to 1967, and they reprised similar roles in the TV series The Gnomes of Dulwich (1969), as ornamental figures who come to life in a south London garden.
Lloyd's subsequent partnership with that revered battleaxe Peggy Mount came out of stage work, a West End production of JB Priestley's When We Are Married which led to the ITV series Lollipop Loves Mr Mole (1971-72). For Southern TV, Lloyd created a series for children, Lord Tramp (1977), in which he played one Hughie Wagstaff, a vagrant who suddenly came into a title, an ancestral estate and a fortune. It was the essence of Lloyd's humour that in all this there was pure fun rather than the remotest suspicion of anything that might be called satire. He continued to perform on television and in pantomime into his 70s, having developed a considerable reputation as a serious actor on stage and television.
Lloyd was born in Chester, the son of a commercial traveller for a local tobacco manufacturer who later became manager of the factory, and a piano-teaching mother. Hugh went to the city's Queen's school kindergarten, and at the age of eight wrote, directed and starred in his own pantomime. His father wanted him to have a "proper" job to fall back on, and, after leaving the King's school, Lloyd worked as a reporter for the Chester Chronicle from 1939 to 1942, during which time he founded the Chester Repertorygoers club and the Hugh Lloyd Repertory Revue Company. At 17, he played the philosophising waiter in a Chester Royalty Theatre production of George Bernard Shaw's You Never Can Tell. For his production of his own War Follies of 1940, he played the piano and impersonated Winston Churchill.
When he reached conscription age, Lloyd volunteered for the RAF, which turned him down, so he applied to MI5, which said he was too young but suggested he re-apply later. He didn't, instead going on a radio-operator's course for the Merchant Navy at Colwyn Bay, Wales and drifting into entertaining troops around the world for Ensa as a member of George Thomas's Globetrotters. This lasted for three years until the war ended.
Doing seaside shows after the war, he was "discovered", like Terry Scott, by the husband and wife team Ronnie Brandon and Dickie Pounds. He and Scott did four consecutive seasons together, including one in which they played two lodgers - the formula that was eventually to evolve into Hugh and I on television. Lloyd had cameo roles in many programmes, including the controversial BBC comedy series Till Death Us Do Part series, starring Warren Mitchell, which ran till 1975, and in its successor of a decade later, In Sickness and In Health.
By the 1960s Lloyd was so popular with the British public that when the Observer asked readers who they would like to see as president if the Queen were ever replaced, the top two names were Peter Ustinov and Hugh Lloyd.
Remaining a pantomime favourite virtually to the end of his career, Lloyd always tackled his roles with an energy that would have done credit to a much younger man. After being ill for a week during the run of Dick Whittington at Wimbledon, he returned with such verve that within ten seconds of coming on, he had nosedived into the orchestra pit and had to receive stitches in hospital. He was back in the show before the final curtain came down.
He accrued considerable acclaim as a straight actor, playing a dying filing clerk in Alan Bennett's BBC2 Play of the Week, A Visit from Miss Protheroe (1978), and in the same writer's Say Something Happened (1982), alongside Bennett favourite Thora Hird. He played at the National Theatre for a year in the early 1980s, in Sheridan's The Critic, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. In the latter, as Firs, the maudlin butler, he timed his dying moments according to whether he needed to get a train home. He toured with the NT in the same three plays to Chicago in 1986.
In the early 1990s he appeared at the National Theatre of Wales, which he preferred to the English version, possibly because the plays were the broad comedies Sailor Beware and Watch it Sailor. During his two seasons at the Chichester Festival Theatre he appeared in Harold Brighouse's Hobson's Choice, followed by a tour, and in Lionel Bart's musical Lock Up Your Daughters.
In 1994, he was persuaded by Anthony Hopkins to play in the first film he directed, August, based on Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Lloyd also appeared in the stage version at Theatr Clwyd.
In his 2002 autobiography, Thank God for a Funny Face, which had a foreword by Hopkins, Lloyd helpfully gave his own estimation of himself: "I will tell you what I am not, and hope never will be: a snob, a chauvinist, a Wrexham football club supporter [he followed Chester City] or a Tory." A lifelong Methodist, he voted Liberal, because "a vote for Tory or Labour is a vote for Us versus Them."
Lloyd married an Ensa colleague, Anne Rodgers, in 1948, but they were divorced after two years. In the late 1950s he married Mavis Polley, who played the piano for a Felixstowe show on which they met. They were divorced in the late 1960s. He married Carole Wilkinson in 1969, but they split up. In 1983 he married Shän Davies, a reporter on the Sunday People, who conducted staged interviews with him when, in the later stages of his career, he entertained on sea cruises; she survives him.
· Hugh Lewis Lloyd, comedy actor, born April 22 1923; died July 14 2008
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