The actor Nicholas Ball, who has died aged 78, landed his greatest tv function when he starred as a down-at-heel cockney non-public eye within the ITV sequence Hazell in 1978.
James Hazell begins his personal detective company after being invalided out of the police and turning to the bottle, triggering the tip of his marriage. He quickly turns into embroiled in violence as he tackles London low life, with the gritty actuality extending to the crime-buster taking beatings himself.
“It could have been unattainable to make a sequence like this with out violence,” stated Ball. “We have now tried to point out that violence hurts. It’s essential to make violence look as repulsive as doable. If a bloke takes a kicking, he doesn’t leap up and run politely down the street.”
Hazell was based mostly on novels written by the journalist Gordon Williams and the footballer-turned-manager Terry Venables underneath the joint pen title PB Yuill. “He’s new, he’s robust, he’s Hazell,” proclaimed publicity from the manufacturing firm, Thames Tv, whose controller of drama, Verity Lambert, enthused in regards to the books’ “cockney sense of humour” and the potential for displaying “the underbelly of London”.
That included seedy scenes shot in Acton, the East Finish and Clapton greyhound stadium, alongside fashionable location filming in Soho, however nothing may cease rankings falling from a peak of 17m after the BBC scheduled a season of Robert Redford movies in opposition to Hazell in 1979 throughout its second sequence.
The programme ended and Ball struggled to bounce again – concurrently his private life was falling aside. In 1978, he married Pamela Stephenson, the New Zealand-born actor about to seek out fame in Britain within the satirical sketch present Not the 9 O’Clock Information. The wedding was over after 18 months and tv affords had been skinny on the bottom for Ball, who struggled financially.
He continued to pop up in character components on tv, however didn’t scale the heights he may need anticipated. Nonetheless, he had a number one function as Detective Chief Inspector Nick Corridor of the Flying Squad within the third sequence of Thief Takers (1995), then performed Garry Ryan, the rock star-turned-chair of Earls Park FC who’s accountable for the demise of its supervisor, within the ultimate sequence of Footballers’ Wives (2006) – an element he first took within the spin-off Footballers’ Wive$: Further Time (2005-06). “He was an entire rat, firing folks and sleeping with different males’s wives,” stated Ball.
Shortly afterwards, he performed one other display screen villain, Terry Bates, chief of a gang of soccer hooligans, in EastEnders on and off between 2007 and 2009. Most memorably, whereas storming the Queen Vic to search for his reformed former confederate Jase Dyer (Stephen Lord), the gang smashed the pub up and took Peggy Mitchell (Barbara Windsor) and others hostage. Later, Terry fatally stabbed Jase and was jailed for all times. His demise in 2019, off display screen, gave the cleaning soap the storyline of his funeral going down within the fictional Walford.
Ball was born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, to Dorothy (nee Frith, often called Maggie), a trainer, and Robert Ball, {an electrical} engineer, and grew up in Hastings, East Sussex. On leaving college at 15, he acted with the novice group on the Stables theatre, Hastings, for 5 years whereas working by day as a lorry driver, labourer and deckchair attendant.
When a buddy utilized to coach at Bristol Previous Vic theatre college, he did the identical and each had been accepted. Whereas there, Ball took a small function as a despatch rider in a 1968 episode of the well-known TV sequence Z Vehicles.
In 1969, he joined the repertory firm at Hull Arts Centre for its opening play, Don’t Construct a Bridge, Drain the River, by Alan Plater. Then, he was an early member of the Moveable theatre firm, a co-operative – based by the author David Hare and the director Tony Bicât – that toured Britain and Europe. This was adopted by a stint on the Royal Courtroom theatre, London, in 1975.
A yr later, he made an impression on display screen with a run as Mr Minter in Thames Tv’s afternoon marriage-guidance serial {Couples}. It included a 10-minute monologue – “a husband telling his facet of the wedding story,” Ball recalled.
This led him to be forged in Thames’s 1976 peak-time sequence The Crezz as Colin Pitman, an East Ender who makes it to the highest of the promoting tree, then has to cope with a drink drawback. Sadly for Ball, the programme – set in a west London crescent, with every episode specializing in a unique family – didn’t seize viewers’ imaginations, however Hazell adopted shortly afterwards, with Ball beating John Nettles and others to the starring function.
Then, other than different dramas, he made appearances in sitcoms: as a professor in The Younger Ones in 1982; a movie producer in Colin’s Sandwich in 1990; a simulant (“a sort of terminator,” he defined) in Pink Dwarf in 1991; and a consumer of David (Robert Bathurst) in Chilly Ft in 2000 who takes a liking to Karen’s mom (Mel Martin).
Ball’s later movie roles included a gangster in Out of Depth (2000), the contract killer Harry Webster in The Krays: Useless Man Strolling (2018) and Charlie Kray in A New Breed of Legal (2023).
Ball and Stephenson divorced in 1984. In 2019 he married the actor Ayda Kay after they’d been collectively for greater than 20 years, and he or she survives him.
