Bernard Holley
Actor best remembered for a long spell as a copper in Z Cars and as Axon Man in Doctor Who
BERNARD HOLLEY, the actor, who has died aged 81, came to fame on television pounding the beat as PC Newcombe in the BBC’S groundbreaking police series Z Cars before playing one of Doctor Who’s most colourful monsters.
Holley joined Z Cars in 1967, five years after Troy Kennedy Martin’s creation shook up television with its modern, warts-and-all portrayal of policing in Britain.
Set in the fictional Liverpool suburb of Newtown, it was renowned for its Ford Zephyr patrol cars with the call-signs Z Victor One and Z Victor Two. But Holley had a confession to make while filming one of his earliest episodes: he could not drive.
The exasperated director solved the problem by putting a police uniform on a stunt performer for wide shots before replacing him with Holley. This was not the first time the actor had had to get round his lack of a driving licence. Months earlier, he had appeared as a villain in the Z Cars
spin-off Softly Softly.
When he was required to drive a vehicle out on location, he had to “mime” steering, while out of shot a stunt artist hung from the open door, held the wheel and changed gears with his feet. Real-life oncoming vehicles honked their horns, he recalled: “It was really terrifying.”
In Z Cars, Holley was the dependable, down-to-earth bobby. He clocked up 277 episodes in almost four years (1967-71), with only three actors appearing in more – James Ellis (PC, Sergeant, then Inspector Bert Lynch), John Slater (Detective Sergeant Stone) and Douglas Fielding (PC, then Sergeant Quilley).
Holley found it hard to leave his Z Cars
role behind when he played Gilbert Gifford in the acclaimed historical serial Elizabeth R
(BBC, 1971), featuring Glenda Jackson’s defining portrayal of the virgin queen. He remembered walking into a rehearsal scene in which David Collings as Sir Anthony Babington (who plotted with Mary, Queen of Scots, to assassinate Elizabeth) was on the rack and asking: “Excuse me, sir, are you in for a short stretch?”
Holley was then offered the Doctor Who
role that would keep him in demand at fan conventions for the rest of his life, after the director Michael Ferguson asked him in the BBC club: “How do you think you’d look in gold?”
The part was as the main alien among the gold-skinned, curly-haired, bulb-eyed humanoids featured in the 1971 adventure “The Claws of Axos”. The Axons are brought along to destroy Earth by the Master (played by Roger Delgado), arch enemy of Jon
Pertwee’s Time Lord. Barely recognisable, Holley was credited as “Axon Man”. He and his fellow humanoids were created with golden greasepaint, wigs, psychedelic body stockings lined with chamois leather, and, for the eyes, prosthetics made from pingpong balls.
Nevertheless, Holley was still in Z Cars mode, turning up to rehearsals with a prop police cap and calling out: “Z Victor One calling Axos. Z Victor One calling Axos.” This time his attempts at humour were not so well received, especially when one of Pertwee’s occasional grumpy moods was rubbing off on both cast and crew.
Audiences appreciated Holley’s contribution to the Doctor Who canon, although the make-up he wore also left its mark. “It was uncomfortable occasionally with those things on my eyes,” he told the actor-writer and Doctor Who aficionado Toby Hadoke in a 2013 interview, “and, for many weeks afterwards, I got bits of gold that would suddenly appear from nowhere in my hairline. My face would be red by the time I scrubbed it off.”
Axon Man – a role that Holley reprised in the 2011 Big Finish audio drama “The Feast of Axos” – was not the actor’s first part in Doctor Who. He had previously played Peter Haydon, a member of an archaeological expedition team from Earth to the planet Telos in the four-part story “The Tomb of the Cybermen” (1967), but his character made an early exit, shot dead by a cybergun in the second episode. That entire adventure was believed to be a “lost classic”,
probably destroyed in the way that many programmes in the BBC archives were in those days, until a Hong Kong TV station discovered copies in 1991. It went on to top the video charts the next year, outselling
The Silence of the Lambs in its first week.
Haydon was another role that Holley revisited in another Big Finish audio production, “Return to Telos” (2015), one of his final acting jobs.
Bernard John Holley was born at Eastcote, Middlesex, on August 9 1940, the middle of three sons, to Doris (née Martin) and Fred Holley, a packer in a metal manufacturing business. When he was two, his father died and his mother later remarried and had six more children.
At Kilburn Grammar School, London, the nearest he came to appearing in a play was taking part in rehearsals for Hamlet. Walking across the stage, something fell out of his pocket – a cigarette packet, spotted by a teacher, with the result that his acting opportunities were taken away from him.
Nevertheless, he trained at Rose Bruford College and, on graduating in 1963, joined the repertory company at the Theatre Royal, Lincoln.
On television he proved to be a powerful supporting actor. He was a regular in the drama series Clayhanger (1976) as Charlie Orgreave, former childhood friend of Edwin, and, from 1982 to 1984, appeared alongside Jill Gascoine’s female cop in The Gentle Touch as Detective Inspector Mike Turnbull, a character he took to the spin-off series C.A.T.S. Eyes for one episode in 1985.
He also played PC Mcmahon in the children’s Liverpool street gang drama
Rocky O’rourke (1976), the Power Master in the second series (1985) of the big-budget cult sci-fi drama The Tripods, the Lib Dem
leader Paddy Ashdown in Thatcher: The Final Days (1991) and a vicar, Reverend Green, in the teen soap Hollyoaks (from 2000 to 2001).
There were runs in sitcoms as Mr Hurst, a teacher, in Please Sir! (1971 and 1972) and Richard, in a relationship with Lesley Joseph’s outrageous flirt Dorien, in Birds of a Feather (1998).
Holley also had a starring role as the modern-day Peter Elston in the sitcom Now and Then (1983-84) by John Esmonde and Bob Larbey. As a husband and father, he watches the development of his rebellious son and recalls his own childhood and adolescence in flashback.
On stage his career included a West End role as Tom, the amorous young geologist in Charles Laurence’s comedy My Fat Friend (1972-73), which ran at the Globe, Shaftesbury Avenue (now the Gielgud), after touring. The star was Kenneth Williams, who was known to be awkward and put the fear of God into some actors, but Holley said they had a good relationship, even gaining himself complimentary mentions in the Carry On star’s diaries.
He also recalled that another member of the cast “walked through every single one of Ken’s laugh lines”, and Williams simply repeated her line, then said his own. It taught Holley a technique he would later use himself: “I learnt that if there’s a big unexpected laugh and the next line that somebody gives is a cue for your next laugh, just repeat the line,” he said.
Bernard Holley married, in 1964, Jean Brockie, who survives him along with their son.