Obituary: Margot Boyd

Margot Boyd, the stage and radio actor who has died aged 94, had the voice of a duchess and a way of delivering every word she spoke as if she were addressing the back row of the gallery. She brought the sound of the grande dame to every role during more than 70 years of acting, and in recent years was best known as Mrs Antrobus in The Archers on Radio 4. While she did not normally play actual aristocrats, she remarked: "I've always played terribly fierce parts. But I've never felt fierce. Petrified, more like. I'm a terrible worrier."

In 1984, as a 71-year-old member of the BBC radio drama company, Boyd found a note in her file asking her to travel to Birmingham for a one-off appearance in The Archers, to give a talk to the over-60s club on "the colourful world of the Afghan hound". She knew "not a lot" about the programme ("I had never actually listened to it"), but her father had worked as an estate manager, and in her native Bath "every other woman was a Mrs Antrobus ... it was full of ex-colonial people who had servants galore. They were all very horsey and doggy." A regular visitor to Crufts dog show in former years, she proved such a success in Ambridge that Mrs Antrobus became a regular character for the next two decades.

Born Beryl Billings, Boyd belonged to a family that loved the theatre and entertaining itself with recitations. Acting at school led to a place at Rada, where she won a gold medal and found herself in a play directed by George Bernard Shaw. "He was wonderful - very encouraging," she recalled. Her first professional job was in twice-nightly rep at the Theatre Royal, Leeds. Although in her 20s, she would play women of 55 or more, and got the chance to play in all the touring West End productions. Thus it was a natural step to join the touring companies and go to London.

In 1950 Boyd got a part in Toni Block's Flowers for the Living at the Duchess Theatre, and ten years later came her first venture into Agatha Christie, Go Back for Murder. In the meantime, she had her own BBC-TV series as Mary Pemberton in Our Miss Pemberton (1957), and three years later was Mrs Trench in Richard Hearne's Leave It To Pastry.

Noël Coward gave her a two-year run in Waiting In The Wings, in the leading role of a manager of a home for retired actors. Not one of Coward's best plays, it nevertheless brought together a bunch of famous old players, led by Sybil Thorndike. When Coward turned up in Dublin to rehearse it before the London opening, he told the cast: "You're all worried in case you dry up. But I don't give a damn. If you forget a line I'll shout it from the box."

In James Hanley's new piece, Say Nothing (Theatre Royal, Stratford East, 1962) Boyd played a voracious, bulky, adulterous wife who thinks only of money. Her performance particularly deserved wider attention, for the play was quite unusual - a gloomy but original and sharp-witted study of a family which had turned in on itself. But without a transfer it languished. She returned to Agatha Christie, in the triple bill Rule of Three.

Then Boyd tried musical comedy. Joining Sandy Wilson's sequel to The Boy Friend at the Players, she came forward as the formidable Lady Brockhurst in the mildly successful Divorce Me, Darling (Globe, 1965). After touring to Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool and Birmingham as the housekeeper of a tense theatrical household in Lesley Storm's They Ride On Broomsticks, Boyd returned to the West End. Playing opposite James Stewart in Mary Chase's Harvey (Prince of Wales, 1975) she was cast as the mountainous Mrs Ethel Chauvenet.

Television work continued with Dixon of Dock Green and Middlemarch; in 1973 came an appearance in ITV's Upstairs, Downstairs and there was also a lot of radio work. Looking back at her introduction to The Archers, she remarked: "When I first looked at the script it was one of the funniest things I'd ever read. In my 70s I'd have been mad not to have taken it on. I've always loved working on radio anyway. It demands such precision and discipline to get the timing right."

Boyd, who did not marry, found her 90th birthday celebrated with a surprise party at BBC Pebble Mill, Birmingham, when she went to record scenes for the programme, now as the oldest-ever member of the cast. She had her favourite lunch: egg and chips with a whisky and soda.

Margot Boyd, actor, born September 26 1913; died May 20 2008

Obituary: Ivan Dixon

For most people, Ivan Dixon, who has died of kidney failure aged 76, was the black guy in the TV sitcom Hogan's Heroes, set in a German PoW camp during the second world war. From 1965 to 1970, He played Sergeant James "Kinch" Kinchloe, the communications specialist frequently ordered by Colonel Hogan (Bob Crane) to encode messages. Although rather less dominant than some of the other leading characters, Kinch took part in most of the group's schemes to outwit their Nazi captors. More significant, however, was that Dixon, who "didn't really enjoy being Sergeant Kinchloe", was one of the first African-American actors to play a leading character in a popular sitcom who was not an underling.

It was but a small victory on the road to equality, and there seemed nothing in the likable portrayal of Kinchloe to suggest that Dixon was a radical figure. Yet, by the time he took the role, he had already broken through several race barriers and would subsequently go on to break through even more. In 1959, Dixon appeared in Lorraine Hansberry's groundbreaking drama A Raisin in the Sun, the first Broadway play by a black woman and the first to be directed on Broadway by a black man (Lloyd Richards). It ran for 538 performances, and for the first time black audiences came to Broadway to see a play about themselves. Dixon played Joseph Asagai, the Nigerian exchange student who tries to persuade the daughter of the family to embrace a "back-to-Africa" philosophy.

Almost the complete Broadway cast of the play, including its star, Sidney Poitier, were retained for the slightly toned-down 1961 film version. Dixon had become friends with Poitier when they appeared together as Mau Mau fighters in Something of Value (1957). Dixon then supported Poitier in Otto Preminger's movie Porgy and Bess (1959), and played his brother in A Patch of Blue (1965). Dixon also acted as Poitier's stunt double in The Defiant Ones (1958).

He was born in Harlem, the son of a grocery store owner. He graduated in drama from North Carolina Central University in 1954, and three years later appeared on Broadway, playing three roles in Cave Dwellers, the William Saroyan play about the theatre, followed by A Raisin in the Sun. Dixon then found plentiful employment in television series such as Perry Mason, The Defenders, Dr Kildare and The Twilight Zone, before making Nothing but a Man (1964), the film of which he was proudest.

In it, he played a railroad worker in the deep south, facing racial injustice and seeking to escape the demands of marriage and fatherhood, not wishing to repeat the mistakes his own father committed. The film, directed by German-born Michael Roemer, was a straightforward depiction of black life in the US, with Dixon's honest portrayal one of its great strengths.

After his four-and-a-half-year stint on Hogan's Heroes, Dixon directed television shows, starting with a couple of episodes of the Bill Cosby Show, before gradually widening his net to include The Waltons, The Rockford Files, and Magnum PI. He also directed a blaxploitation thriller Trouble Man (1972). In a way, he had learned from Poitier how to tread the fine line between black aspirations and white anxieties, although Dixon overstepped the line when he directed the inflammatory The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973).

The film concerned the first black CIA agent (Lawrence Cook) who, after five years of menial assignments, quits and uses the skills he learned about terrorist tactics to organise black and Latino teenage gangs into guerrilla outfits to bring instability to American cities. "You really wanna mess with whitey," he tells them. "I can show you how." One of his methods was to gain access to white establishments. "Remember, a black man with a mop, tray or broom in his hand can go damn near anywhere in this country, and a smiling black man is invisible."

The film, which Dixon also produced - after managing to raise nearly all of its $1m budget from black investors - explained that it "expressed everything that I felt about race ... I had tried only to depict black anger, not to suggest armed revolt as a solution." Yet, inevitably, the distributors pulled the film after two weeks under pressure from the FBI. For all the film's deficiencies, The Spook Who Sat by the Door remains one of the few uncompromising representations of black armed resistance in the US.

Dixon went on to direct far less incendiary material for television and appeared in a few films, notably Michael Schultz's funny and funky Car Wash (1976) as the wise ex-con trying to run his business in the midst of chaos.

He is survived by his wife of 52 years, a daughter and a son.

Ivan Dixon, actor and director; born April 6 1931; died March 16 2008

Obituary- Dave Atkins

The character actor Dave Atkins, who has died of a heart attack aged 67, was an unmistakably outsize figure, most familiar as an uncouth pub landlord in the television sitcom Men Behaving Badly, from 1992 to 1995. In life, he was at ease with his calling as a supporting rather than leading player, and was a companionable man who never forgot his working-class London roots.

Despite often playing Cockneys, he was actually born in Plymouth, where his father had been stationed at the outbreak of the second world war. As part of his father's civilian job with the Wimpy burger chain, the family moved to Torquay, then to Paddington, before being rehoused in Watford. For someone of his background, entering Watford grammar school represented a genuine achievement. Contemporaries recall him as "constantly performing" and, ironically, slim and slight, with delicate hands. In addition to playing the trumpet, he was one of many to have their creativity kindled by the school's dynamic English master, Dickie James, who ran the amateur dramatics society. Atkins' performance as the cutting northerner Nipple, in David Halliwell's Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs, proved particularly memorable.

Atkins left school at 16 but, in his mid-20s and following the example of a schoolfriend, Mick Jones, trained as a drama teacher at the Bulmershe College of Higher Education (now part of the University of Reading). Gaining his Equity card at the Palace Theatre, Watford, playing Captain Pugwash under the direction of Giles Havergal, he did much work with Theatre In Education, touring schools.

By now almost as rotund in head as in body, with thinning hair and a teeth-displaying grin, Atkins was the English soldier to Dame Eileen Atkins' St Joan at the Old Vic in 1977. In Cameron Mackintosh's 1979 revival of My Fair Lady, with Tony Britton as Higgins, he understudied Peter Bayliss as Doolittle, and played four other minor roles. A favourite, and deeply unlikely, role was as Queen Victoria in a revival of Maria Marten - The Murder In The Red Barn at Neu Isenburg in Germany.

After playing a villain in The Sweeney (1977), Euston Films used him again for Minder (1982) and John Mortimer's Paradise Postponed (1986). He also appeared as a boatyard owner opposite Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of Four (1987), as Ted Voules, the local copper, in Jeeves and Wooster (1991), and in Alan Clarke's The Firm (1989), with Gary Oldman and Phil Davis.

His movies included Lindsay Anderson's splenetic Britannia Hospital (1982); Personal Services (1987), as Julie Walters' "sugar daddy" with a big car; and Prick Up Your Ears (1987), again with Oldman, where he played Joe Orton's downstairs neighbour. Another of his favourite assignments was as a boozy caravanner in Life's a Gas (1992), a 15-minute short film for Channel 4 directed by Davis.

Atkins was in Men Behaving Badly from its beginnings on ITV with Harry Enfield as the star, and continued as the football-obsessed landlord after Enfield's replacement by Neil Morrissey, and the show's (rather surprising) success after transferring to BBC1. He was also behind the bar in The Yob (1988), one of the Comic Strip series, was the rowdy swashbuckler in Plunkett and Macleane (1999), and had his last role in the forthcoming ITV programme Whitechapel. He did not marry, and is survived by his sisters.

David Atkins, actor, born October 11 1940; died April 23 2008

Obituary: Bernard Archard

The actor Bernard Archard, who has died aged 91, established a forbidding presence as Lt Col Oreste Pinto, a character based on a real-life wartime counter-espionage interrogator, in the BBC television series Spycatcher (1959-61), writes Gavin Gaughan. Tall and angular, with receding hair and a prominent chin, he became a regular authority figure and inquisitor, though not in leading roles.

Archard was born in Fulham, London, where his parents were mayor and mayoress; his father was also a jeweller. He won a scholarship to Rada (1938-39), and an early stage role came as Orsino to Jessica Tandy's Viola in Twelfth Night at the Regent's Park open air theatre. During the second world war, he was a conscientious objector, and was sent to work on land owned by the Quaker movement. At the Edinburgh Festival in 1948, in a production of the Glyndebourne Children's Theatre, he met fellow actor James Belchamber, who was his partner for nearly 60 years.

Making his way around regional repertory, Archard worked at Chesterfield with Margaret Tyzack and at Sheffield with Paul Eddington, Peter Sallis and Patrick McGoohan; like many, he believed McGoohan to be a truly great actor, and they worked together again in a couple of episodes of McGoohan's 1960s TV series Danger Man.

In the mid-1950s, Archard and Belchamber ran a touring repertory company, based in Torquay, with Hilda Braid among its players. They also collaborated on the book and lyrics for Our Jack, a musical based on Walter Greenwood's The Cure For Love, in 1960. Nevertheless, by 1959 Archard was thinking about emigrating to Canada with Belchamber. He postponed his trip to appear in a TV medical drama, then again to do Treason (1959), a Sunday-night play about the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. Unknown to him, this rush of work resulted from a plan by writer-producer Elwyn Jones to demonstrate his suitability for Spycatcher.

Masterminded by Robert Barr, Spycatcher was also produced in the documentary manner, to the extent that Archard was not given billing in the Radio Times until some time into the run. Unlike later, action-orientated spy series, Pinto's half-hour cases, sometimes little more than two-handers, were based on true stories. The debriefing of wartime refugees afforded many opportunities for Archard's incisive qualities. One episode saw him get the desired answers from a suspect by throwing darts at a photo of Hitler.

Running for three seasons, the series brought Archard much recognition; he was wryly amused about receiving "two direct offers of marriage and about a dozen oblique ones". Although half of the episodes still exist, it has never been revived. Nonetheless, when on a continental tour of My Fair Lady in 1983, Archard's presence in Amsterdam caused excitement - Pinto having been Dutch.

He was proud of his role as a magistrate in Terence Rattigan's last play, Cause Celebre, in the West End in 1977, with Glynis Johns. Anthony Shaffer's mocking The Case of the Oily Levantine, at the same venue, Her Majesty's Theatre, two years later, was less successful. However, a full-scale theatrical disaster came with Peter O'Toole's Macbeth at the Old Vic in 1980. Archard played Duncan; he had previously been Angus in Roman Polanski's film version, in 1971.

In the film version of Dad's Army (1971), Archard was a regular general dismissing Captain Mainwaring as a "damn bank clerk!" He was in several of the popular Edgar Wallace B-movies, as well as John Huston's playful The List of Adrian Messenger (1963); he and Huston had a mutual friend in Deborah Kerr.

He was the Duke of Wellington in Number 10 (YTV, 1983), an anthology series depicting prime ministers. For publicity purposes, the actors who took the roles were photographed with Margaret Thatcher; Archard was not impressed by her, but then, he had been a lifelong Guardian reader. He also played a government figure in Hidden Agenda (1990), Ken Loach's controversial film derived from the John Stalker inquiry.

After retiring in his early 80s, Archard lived contentedly in Somerset with Belchamber, who survives him.

Bernard Joseph Archard, actor, born August 20 1916; died May 1 2008

The father of British electronic music remembered

The composer Tristram Cary, who has died aged 82, was widely regarded as the father of British electronic music. While he also produced conventional works, he realised early on that a new form of music could be constructed out of "pure" sound, of natural or electronic origin, and that the ideal device for honing it was the tape recorder, developed in Germany during the second world war. Though he did not know it at first, similar experiments were taking place at radio and television studios in Paris and Cologne, creating a distinctively postwar sound world.

Tristram's first electronic commission came in 1955, to accompany the radio play The Japanese Fishermen, about a fishing boat caught up in the Pacific hydrogen bomb tests of 1954. His first conventional piece to be performed was the Partita for Piano in 1947, and it was in 1955 again that he made his breakthough into films, with the score for the classic Ealing comedy The Ladykillers.

From then on, he produced work in both conventional and electronic disciplines, often combining the two, for concert hall, cinema, television and radio. His films included Quatermass and the Pit (1967) and Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1970), while on television his electronic sounds pushed Doctor Who's daleks on to the screen for the first time (1963), alongside conventional scores for Jane Eyre (1963) and Madame Bovary (1964).

For the British pavilion at Expo '67 in Montreal, Tristram created a sound environment that included music for 16 film loops running concurrently. In the same year, he founded the electronic music studio at the Royal College of Music, London, and built a similar facility for himself at the new family home in Fressingfield, Suffolk.

Keen to create an instrument capable of producing controlled electronic sound for his compositions, Tristram then formed, along with Peter Zinovieff and David Cockerell, EMS (Electronic Music Studios) in 1969, and set about co-designing what was to become the VCS3 (Putney) synthesiser. The instrument was equipped with scientific vernier dials for the precise selection of frequency. It was soon joined by a small keyboard add-on, which infuriated some, bringing electronic music back to the 12-tone chromatic scale from which it had been trying to escape. Nevertheless, the VCS3 (and its 1971 derivative, the Synthi A - built, James Bond-style, into an attache case) became the must-have tool for a generation of musicians, including Pink Floyd, Brian Eno, White Noise, Jean Michel Jarre and, of course, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

The third son of the novelist Joyce Cary and his wife Gertrude, Tristram was born in Oxford. He left Westminster school early to study science as an exhibitioner at Christ Church, Oxford - his father, whose earnings as a writer were modest, was anxious for his son to enter a profession that offered financial security. But Tristram's studies were interrupted when he joined the Royal Navy as a radar specialist from 1943 to 1946.

The Cary household had always been full of music, with Tristram learning to play the piano from an early age, a hobby that ran parallel with a keen interest in radio. In the navy, supported by the required training in electronics, he found his interest in music, connecting with the world of science. He returned to Oxford, swapped courses to philosophy, politics and economics, and graduated with a BA, before moving to London and enrolling at Trinity College of Music. In the evenings, he taught to top up his funds, and started to build his home studio.

In July 1951, Tristram married Doris (Dorse) Jukes. They had two sons, John and Robert, and a daughter, Charlotte. Much of the family home in London was let to provide income for the struggling young composer's family, while the corner of the living room in their own bohemian flat (always full of artists and musicians, especially after closing time) was given over to "the machine", a choice collection of electronic equipment, much of it army surplus or home-built, including a disc-cutting lathe (on which Tristram had spent his £50 demob pay from the navy), mixing equipment, oscillators and (from 1952) an early tape recorder.

By 1974, Tristram was frustrated by having to write commercial music over the more experimental works on which he wished to concentrate, and moved to Australia, taking up a teaching post at Adelaide University, where he was later appointed honorary visiting research fellow, and awarded a doctorate of music. Dorse and Charlotte joined him briefly before returning to England, and the couple soon divorced. In 1986, Tristram resumed self-employment, operating as Tristram Cary Creative Music Services, continuing to work on new commissions up until the time of his death. In 2003, he married Jane Delin, his "wonderful companion" for some 20 years.

Tristram underwent heart bypass surgery in 2001, after which he and I worked, across the continents, on a double CD of his Doctor Who music. His re-recording of a suite from The Ladykillers won Gramophone magazine's best film music CD award in 1998. He also produced Soundings, a collection of his electronic and electro-acoustic works also a double CD. He was, however, disappointed never to have had a hit record.

Those of us to whom his work was an inspiration would disagree - he was a true pioneer, and for his services to Australian music received the Medal of the Order of Australia in 1991. He is survived by Dorse, Jane, and his three children.

Tristram Cary, musician, born May 14 1925; died April 24 2008

Johnny Byrne- Made on film

With its graphic descriptions of the rock lifestyle of the 1960s, the bestseller, Groupie, written in 1969 by Johnny Byrne and Jenny Fabian, was, briefly, a London media succès de scandale. Yet within a decade, Byrne, who has died aged 72, was well set on the path which, through various twists and turns, sealed his reputation as a reliable source of comforting Sunday evening television. He wrote 29 episodes of All Creatures Great and Small (1977-90) and, from 1992, 23 episodes of Heartbeat.

Byrne started life in a tenement in Dublin's Northside, the eldest of 13 children born to working-class parents. Arriving in Britain in 1956, he cut down Christmas trees in the Lake District, worked on the Liverpool docks and was a guide on the river Thames in Oxford, before teaching English as a foreign language around European capitals.

By the 1960s, he was a tour manager for the American Shel Talmy, who was record producer for the Who and the Kinks - and Byrne's agent. The Irishman began writing poetry and edited several small-circulation magazines. His short stories appeared in the British magazine Science Fantasy (renamed Impulse in 1966). One of his stories was selected by leading Canadian critic Judith Merrill, for her The Best of Science Fiction 1965-1966. Byrne also featured at the Edinburgh festival and at underground happenings, as part of the Poisoned Bellows, alongside poet Spike Hawkins.

Then came Groupie and, in 1970, Byrne's first TV script, for one of the last BBC Wednesday Plays. Made on film, Season of the Witch starred Robert Powell, Paul Nicholas and singer Julie Driscoll as dope-smoking exponents of the counterculture. The early 1970s found Byrne living in a commune, and contributing scripts to Thames TV's children's series Pipkins.

In 1972 came the first of Byrne's two excursions into film, adapting Spike Milligan's book Adolf Hitler - 'My Part in His Downfall'. Jim Dale was an annoyingly chirpy Spike; the genuine article had a cameo, as his own father. The other, To Die For (1994), was once described as a gay version of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), and not to be confused with Gus Van Sant's film of the same name.

In his 1960s science fiction, Byrne had dealt with mature themes, but he found that in TV the genre was categorised as juvenilia. He was script editor on the first series of Space 1999 (1975-76), for which he also wrote 11 episodes. Regretting increased American involvement, he observed: "Over-produced series have the smack of death when they finally fetch up on our screens."

From 1981 to 1984, he wrote three Doctor Who stories, including Tom Baker's penultimate performance, and two 1980s ITV series, the daytime drama Miracles Take Longer and the children's series Dodger, Bonzo and the Rest.

Following the initial All Creatures Great and Small, he contributed to the BBC's One By One (1985), a similar series about a trainee vet, then returned, as script consultant, for All Creatures' late 80s revival. Noah's Ark (1997-98), created by him in the Heartbeat mould and starring Anton Rodgers, was less successful. He had a keen interest in Celtic mythology, incorporating themes and character names into sci-fi scripts. He also lectured on former Yugoslavia.

His wife Sandy, whom he married in 1975, and their sons Jasper, Barnaby and Nicholas, survive him.