Terrence Hardiman
Actor of varied gifts who struck fear into a generation of children as the ‘Demon Headmaster’
TERRENCE HARDIMAN, the actor, who has died aged 86, spent much of his career playing authority figures and was probably best known as the Demon Headmaster, terrifying children witless in the eponymous CBBC production, which ran for three series from 1996 to 1998.
Adapted by Helen Cresswell from Gillian Cross’s series of stories, The Demon Headmaster was an immediate hit. An extraordinary 60 per cent of children aged four to 14 watched the first series, and pre-broadcast trials were so successful that a second series was commissioned months before the first was screened.
With lines like “It’s a pity there should be children at all; childhood is such a useless waste of time,” Hardiman sneers splendidly as the power-crazed Headmaster (as he is known), who controls children by lifting his dark glasses and staring at them with his mesmerising greenish eyes. He brainwashes them into saying like automatons: “The headmaster is a marvellous man,” but his ultimate aim is revealed to be even more sinister – to genetically alter the human race, wipe out all children and take over the world.
Hardiman often found himself cast as villains, his roles including German soldiers in Second World War television drama series such as Colditz
(as a Gestapo officer) and Wish Me Luck
(as a German general), though there were notable exceptions.
As Luftwaffe Major Hans Dietrich Reinhardt in the third series (1979) of the BBC’S acclaimed Secret Army, he was a “good German”, a melancholy war hero and recipient of the Iron Cross, who sees that Germany is losing the war but is nevertheless determined to penetrate the Brussels-based resistance group Lifeline – only to end up betrayed by his Gestapo nemesis Standartenführer Ludwig Kessler (Clifford Rose) and shot by a firing squad.
Hardiman was also a favourite on the pantomime circuit, memorably as Squire Skinflint in Mother Goose and a truly malicious Abanazer in Aladdin
– and he delighted audiences round the country in Classic Ghosts,
comprising two stage adaptations of famous ghost stories, MR James’s Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad
and Dickens’s The Signalman.
But the actor in person was as far removed from his screen persona as it was possible to be. On visits to schools and children’s centres he always had time for children and staff. Away from the screen he volunteered thousands of hours of his time to record audio books for the Calibre Audio Library, which provides audio books for people unable to read print, work which earned him a Silver Centurion service award in 2013.
The son of a policeman, Terrence Hardiman was born in Forest Gate, east London, on April 6 1937 and educated at Buckhurst Hill County High School, Essex. He read English at Fitzwilliam House (now Fitzwilliam College), Cambridge, where he trod the boards with the Marlowe Society and the university Amateur Dramatic Club, alongside Derek Jacobi.
After graduation Hardiman established himself as a stage actor and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. Among his credits was, in 1968, the demon Mephistophilis in Doctor Faustus at Stratford-uponavon; Hardiman’s future Secret Army
co-star Clifford Rose also featured in the cast, as the Chorus.
His first big television break was as a police inspector in Softly, Softly, the spin-off from the original Z Cars,a
casting, he reflected in an interview, that had probably “suggested the pattern of me as an authority figure to directors with limited imagination”. But, he had “no complaints – I earned a living.”
His film and television roles over the years included numerous policemen, lawyers and doctors, among them the barrister Stephen Harvesty in Granada Television’s Crown Court from 1972 to 1983.
In Richard Attenborough’s Oscarwinning film Gandhi (1982), Hardiman was the prime minister Ramsay Macdonald; on stage in 2008 he played Neville Chamberlain in Howard Brenton’s Never So Good (Lyttelton), about the life and career of Harold Macmillan, delightedly waving his agreement with Hitler before, a moment later, glumly announcing the outbreak of war.
Hardiman’s gift for comedy was evident in his panto roles and as Charles Pooter, the fictional diarist, in the 1979 BBC television adaptation of George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody; while in a 1995 episode of the BBC’S time-travel sit-com
Goodnight Sweetheart, when Nicholas Lyndhurst’s character goes back to the 1940s, Hardiman gave a brilliantly observed recreation of John Le Mesurier’s Dad’s Army bank clerk Sergeant Wilson, complete with upper-class drawl and mannerisms.
In the Dickens spoof The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff (BBC Two, 2011) he stole his scenes as the deranged Martin “Fruitcake” Christmasham, complete with a stuffed goose strapped to his head. Other small-screen roles included Grand Wizard Egbert Hellibore in four episodes of The Worst Witch (again for CBBC, 1999); the Abbot of Shrewsbury in Cadfael
opposite his old university friend Derek Jacobi; and in 2010 he appeared as Hawthorne, head of Starship UK and leader of a sinister monk-like group called the Winders in the Doctor Who
story “The Beast Below”, with Matt Smith as the Doctor.
When Hardiman reprised his Demon Headmaster role in a cameo for a revived CBBC version in 2019, he told
Radio Times that he had never expected the series to be so popular: “I started to be recognised in the street… And there were people – youngsters – looking at me, and shouting out at me, and making fun of me, which is very healthy.
“It stopped me being too grand! But then the slightly more remarkable thing, I found, was that it wasn’t just children who were watching. It was parents and other people, too.”
As he reflected, however, it was perhaps not so surprising that his character had remained popular to the present day: “I mean, he’s a horrible person who wants to rule the world. He believes, passionately and deeply and dangerously, that his way is the way that the world should go.
“And we’ve had a few people in political positions, haven’t we, in the world, like that?”
Hardiman is survived by his wife, the actress Rowena Cooper, and by two children.
Terrence Hardiman, born April 6 1937, died May 8 2023