Richard Franklin
Actor who played Captain Mike Yates, helping Jon Pertwee’s Doctor Who fight off alien attacks
RICHARD FRANKLIN, the actor, who has died aged 87, spent much of his career on stage but gained a cult following for his role as Captain Mike Yates, on-and-off travelling companion of the third incarnation of Doctor Who, played by Jon Pertwee.
Franklin’s character, an upper-crust Army officer type, was hailed for his bravery in fighting alien attacks between 1971 and 1974 during the Time Lord’s imposed exile on Earth. He was cast as a possible love interest for the Doctor’s new regular companion, Jo Grant (Katy Manning), although the union never got past Jo being dressed up to go out with him – before being whisked off for a trip in the Tardis.
When, in the 1973 story The Green Death, Yates hears that Jo is to marry a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, he looks crestfallen.
Franklin’s first outing as Captain Yates was in the 1971 story Terror of the Autons, tackling the invasion of robotic life-size mannequins. In one scene, he destroys the hideous Auton doll attacking Jo.
He returned for another eight adventures. In The Mind of Evil (1971), Yates is taken hostage by escaped prisoners while escorting a banned missile across Britain to be destroyed, but the biggest drama for Franklin in The Claws of Axos (1971) was battling the weather on location at Dungeness power station. “We were all wearing pink long johns under our uniforms,” he recalled.
Yates’s brainwashing by a megalomaniac computer in The Green Death, making him turn a gun on the Doctor, leads him to betray the Time Lord in Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974). Although he joins
conspirators planning to return Earth to a “golden age”, they are defeated and he is allowed to resign quietly. Defending his character, Franklin insisted: “Mike wasn’t a traitor – he was totally taken in.”
Nevertheless, there is a reconciliation with the Doctor when Yates uncovers strange events at a Buddhist meditation centre in Planet of the Spiders (1974) at the end of the Pertwee era.
Franklin returned for the programme’s 20th-anniversary story, The Five Doctors (1983), and the 1993 charity special Dimensions in Time. By then, he had been seen by television viewers in his other memorable screen role – as the ruthless business executive Denis
Rigg in Emmerdale Farm (1988-89, shortly before the soap’s title was shortened to Emmerdale).
Denis used skulduggery to buy Home Farm in the fictional Yorkshire village then made more enemies with plans for a quarry. But his reign of terror ended when, skulking around the outbuildings at Emmerdale Farm, he was fatally crushed by Joe Sugden’s prize bull and fell in a pile of manure.
“They made it look as though the bull was attacking me,” said Franklin. “I drew my last breath on the serial in a 4in layer of dung.”
Richard Kimber Franklin was born in London on January 15 1936 to Helen, daughter of Sir Henry Dixon Kimber, 2nd Bt, and Richard Franklin, a surgeon.
He was educated at Westminster School, commissioned into the Royal Green Jackets (Rifle Brigade) for National Service, served as a captain in Queen Victoria’s Rifles and read modern history at Christ Church, Oxford. He then worked in advertising with the Charles Hobson & Grey agency before training as an actor at Rada (1963-65).
During his 1967-68 stint with the Birmingham Rep company, he played Corin in its production of As You Like It, which transferred to the Vaudeville Theatre, London. Ten years later, he was back in the West End to take over the role of George from Michael Crawford in Same Time, Next Year at the Prince of Wales Theatre.
Franklin also wrote and directed his own plays, including Shakespeare Was a Hunchback, performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1983 to mark the 500th anniversary of Richard III’S coronation, and The Luck of the Draw, first performed in 2014 and based on two soldiers’ First World War memoirs – his officer uncle’s letters and a mandolin-playing private’s reminiscences.
One of Franklin’s early television appearances was a 1969 run in the ITV soap Crossroads as Joe Townsend, whom he described as a “guitar-playing layabout”. Later, he popped up as a solicitor in the news agency drama Harry (1993) and a doctor in Heartbeat (in 1997). In films, he played Richard Wagner in Twilight of the Gods (2013) and an engineer in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016).
Franklin also stood, unsuccessfully, as a parliamentary candidate in general elections, for the Liberal Democrats in 1992, UKIP in 2001 and the Silent Majority Party in 2005.
He was unmarried.