His long, thin face tending to dolefulness even in repose, Geoffrey Palmer, who has died aged 93, was one of the finest screen purveyors of pain, sadness and other male emotions desperate to remain unsaid.
Having played his first small TV role in the mid-1950s, he had recently completed a part in the Canadian film An Unquiet Life, a biopic about author Roald Dahl - screen credits spanning a remarkable seven decades are testimony to an actor of rare versatility, reliability, and likability, qualities developed in his early career first in amateur dramatics and then regional repertory theatre.
From the 1970s, Palmer’s distinctively lugubrious features became nationally recognisable in a string of hit sitcoms, in which he was especially effective as upper-middle-class men uncertain that women they loved were as keen on them.
In nine series and two specials of As Time Goes By (BBC1, 1992-2005), he was Lionel Hardcastle, a Korean War veteran and Kenyan ex-pat, who, returning to England after 38 years away, meets again Jean Pargetter (Judi Dench), a former girlfriend with whom he rekindles a relationship hindered by English reticence on both sides. Expertly crafted by Bob Larbey (co-writer of The Good Life), the series chimed with an era in which, through online contact sites such as Friends Reunited, revived love was much in the air.
Hardcastle perfected a portrayal of male romantic uncertainty that Palmer had rehearsed in Butterflies (BBC2, 1978-1983), where he played Ben Parkinson, a reticent dentist and amateur lepidopterist (hence the title), who knows, but doesn’t want to admit, that he is not quite enough for his wife, Ria (Wendy Craig), whose domestic boredom has drawn her to an outwardly flashier man.
Butterflies was written by Carla Lane, who rewarded Palmer’s subtle and affecting performance with a lead part in The Last Song (BBC2, 1981-83). Recent divorcee Leo Bannister provided new scenarios of comic lack of confidence as a man thrown back onto the dating. The successive roles in Butterflies, The Last Song, and As Time Goes By built up into an unofficial trilogy of depictions of English male emotional incompetence.
Apart from baffled partners, Palmer’s other comedic specialism was authoritarians, particularly those who overestimated their level of authority. In three series of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (BBC1, 1976-79), he was Jimmy Anderson, the hapless paranoid ex-soldier brother-in-law of the titular cracked-up businessman, catch-phrase “bit of a cock-up on the [insert most recent disaster] front.”
As had happened with Carla Lane, writer David Nobbs was inspired to create a larger part for Palmer. In A Fairly Secret Army (Channel 4, 1984-86), he played the very Jimmy-like (though renamed for copyright reasons), Harry Kitchener Wellington Truscott. Drawing on real-life stories, strong in the second half of the 1970s, about old soldiers insanely contemplating military coups to save the UK from Labour governments, Nobbs created Palmer’s darkest sitcom role. Truscott, catchphrase “when the balloon goes up”, was a ridiculous deficient, but there hung the possibility that such preposterous figures do sometimes take over countries - an idea that may now be seen as prescient.
While that comedy featured a joke leader, the actor’s gravelly patrician tones ensured regular TV and movie cameos as men with genuine influence, including an admiral in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), the leading English judge Lord Scarman in Ashes to Ashes, and the Lord Chief Justice in the Shakespeare mash-up, The Hollow Crown.
Geoffrey Palmer’s greatest grace note, though, was always pathos. He delivered one of the the most indelibly memorable long speeches in TV drama in Alan Bennett’s The Insurance Man, directed by Richard Eyre.
In Bennett’s play about the writer Franz Kafka, Palmer is credited as “The Angry Doctor”, one of three government officials chairing a tribunal hearing compensation claims. He dismisses an injured woman by questioning the uniqueness of her distress: “She can’t keep her mind on the matter in hand. Nor can I. She winces when she looks in the mirror. So do I.” His colleague objects, “She is crying”, to which The Angry Doctor replies, “So am I.” The part fills three pages of script, but, 34 years on, I remember every inflection and expression.
Aside from his TV, movie and screen appearances, Palmer’s resonant baritone brought much voiceover work, including the Audi cars sales-line: “‘vorsprung durch technik, as they say in Germany.”
The line translates as “progress through technology”. Palmer, progressing through integrity and talent, was the acting equivalent of how the company wanted people to see its cars - classy, dependable, smooth-sounding, enduring.
