The actor Kenneth Cope, who has died aged 93, was extra of a family face than a family identify insofar as he was primarily related to three roles in wildly profitable tv collection: the road dealer Jed Stone in Coronation Avenue (1961-66; returning in 2008-09); the ghostly personal detective Marty Hopkirk in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1969-70); and Ray Hilton in Brookside (1999-2002).
He was, nonetheless, plain Kenneth Cope, a probable lad with an impish method in a sensible gray go well with, in one of the groundbreaking, if short-lived, BBC tv programmes of the final century, the Saturday-night satire present That Was The Week That Was, or TW3, hosted by David Frost and produced by Ned Sherrin for 2 collection (a complete of 37 exhibits, every working 50 minutes) in 1962 and 1963.
The celebs of TW3, other than Frost himself – rising, as Peter Cook dinner stated, “with out hint”, from obscurity – have been the singers Millicent Martin and Lance Percival, and the journalist Bernard Levin. However the appearing ballast, the sharp supply of sketches and the spot-on comedian timing was the province of Cope, Willie Rushton, Roy Kinnear and Al Mancini.
The present, like Past the Fringe, signalled the top of the age of deference, and Cope excelled at registering the contemptuously uncomprehending facial expressions of the abnormal Joe’s sufferer standing by the hands of officialdom, snobbery and incompetence.
Though this priceless high quality of man-in-the-street naturalism, added to his simple allure, could possibly be twisted in off-colour character roles, Cope was principally the chirpy good man. And, as a sharp-witted Liverpudlian, he branched out as a restaurateur, disc jockey and scriptwriter.
He wrote the inaugural sitcom, Thingumybob (1968), for the brand new London Weekend Tv franchise on ITV. The present not solely starred a septuagenarian Stanley Holloway as a pensioner with time on his arms for somewhat gentle mischief, but additionally had a theme tune by Paul McCartney.
Cope, born in Wavertree, Liverpool, was one among 5 kids born to an engineer father. He left Holt highschool at 15 and spent three years as an apprentice toolmaker earlier than profitable a scholarship to the Bristol Previous Vic theatre college in 1950.
On graduating, he joined the Bristol Previous Vic firm, led by John Neville , and appeared in Measure for Measure and Henry V, the latter additionally on tour.
By 1953, he was a tv common in well-liked programmes reminiscent of Billy Bunter, Dixon of Dock Inexperienced, Ivanhoe (starring Roger Moore) and, in 1956, the primary collection (“Six of the Greatest”) of Whack-O!, scripted by Frank Muir and Denis Norden, wherein he performed an keen younger English instructor, Mr FD Worth-Whittaker, on the mercy, alongside together with his pupils, of the vagaries and depredations of Jimmy Edwards in mortarboard, robe and bushy moustache because the cane-wielding, half-drunken head of a minor public college on the slide.
As he launched himself into Coronation Avenue at first of the Nineteen Sixties, Cope made his solely look on the Royal Courtroom in London, in Shelagh Delaney’s second play, The Lion in Love. Though Levin favored it, not many critics thought it a worthy follow-up to Delaney’s smash-hit A Style of Honey, although Cope featured in a robust solid in a northern household drama.
That solid additionally included Renny Lister, whom Cope married in 1961, shortly after she joined him on the set of Corrie as his girlfriend, Jean Stark.
Enjoying Jed Stone had two penalties: he made a novelty pop single with Tony Hatch known as Arms Off, Cease Muckin’ About, which led to a brief contract as a disc jockey on Radio Luxembourg; and, with the producer Peter Eckersley, he wrote a few episodes of the sitcom Flip Out the Lights (1967), starring Arthur Lowe as Leonard Swindley, his Coronation Avenue character, adopting the function of an beginner sleuth in a wacky world of seances and poltergeists. In 1968 he additionally wrote an episode for Jack Rosenthal’s comedy collection The Dustbinmen.
He moved to a brand new degree of celeb with Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). His canny personal detective, in cooperative cahoots with Mike Pratt’s Jeff Randall, was killed within the first episode and returned thereafter with particular powers (and particular results) in a white go well with and wig. The present grew to become a cult collection of 46 episodes, offered in additional than 30 territories.
When he moved together with his household to Oxfordshire within the 70s, he opened two eating places, Martha’s Kitchen in Watlington, and Edwards in Eynsham, close to Witney, providing a free bottle of wine to any member of Fairness who crossed the edge. He proudly declared that Laurence Olivier went house one night with a bottle of Frascati underneath his arm.
He was often lured into the film studios, showing in two of the perfect Carry On movies, Carry On at Your Comfort (1971), set in a cartoon world of commercial relations, and Carry On Matron (1972), lorded over by Hattie Jacques with Kenneth Williams snapping at her heels as an unlikely and importunate guide. Within the first, Cope was Vic Spanner, an obnoxious store steward and, within the second, Cyril Carter, son of Sid James, compelled to “drag up” in feminine nurse apparel as a part of his dad’s try to raid a maternity hospital for contraceptives.
He discovered respite from the Carry On carry-on by writing three collection of a kids’s TV programme, Striker, which was partly impressed by his involvement, by means of his sons, with the youth soccer crew in his native village of Islip. He additionally contributed scripts to The Squirrels (1974-76), a comedy collection of office-politicking with Bernard Hepton because the autocratic boss, and A Sharp Consumption of Breath (1978-81), starring David Jason as a buffeted non-entity earlier than he hit his stride as Del Boy in Solely Fools and Horses.
Cope turned up in quite a few main TV collection, notably Physician Who – as Packard within the 1981 Warriors’ Gate story, with Tom Baker within the Tardis – Casualty, The Invoice, Minder and Kavanagh QC. Considered one of his least profitable ventures was a scouse western spoof, Bootle Saddles, in 1984 (it lasted one season), wherein he performed a Blackpool boarding home supervisor who sells as much as construct a western city, Apache Wells, within the Derbyshire countryside.
He was mistakenly identified with lung most cancers in 2000 when what he had – as if that weren’t sufficient – was persistent obstructive pulmonary illness. He reappeared as an aged Jed in Coronation Avenue in 2008, after a 42-year absence, refusing to go away his house to placate a ruthless property developer; he ended up assaulted and stuffed in a hamper for his pains. Seven years later, his daughter Martha Cope appeared in the identical collection as Joanne, the date of Kevin Webster (Michael Le Vell). In his later years, Cope lived in Southport with Renny.
She survives him, together with their three kids, Martha, Nick and Mark.
