Geoffrey Palmer
oldie poker face of the year
There’s a wonderful scene in Butterflies, Carla Lane’s brilliant, bittersweet sitcom about middle-class, middle-aged ennui, which sums up the subtle majesty of Geoffrey Palmer’s understated acting style. Up until this point, Palmer has played the straight man to Wendy Craig’s suburban heroine, setting up the punchlines, feeding her the gags. ‘What happened?’ she asks, plaintively, wondering why all the passion has vanished from their marriage. ‘The world happened,’ says Palmer, with a mournful growl – and with those three words he turns comedy into tragedy, entertainment into art.
Palmer is a master of the ‘less is more’ school of acting: deadpan, poker-faced – and what a face! He always looked lugubrious, even as a young man. By the time he reached middle age, he’d come to resemble a particularly doleful bloodhound. It’s a face full of gravitas, so it’s ironic that he’s best known for comedy, from The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin to Fawlty Towers.
As befits such an unaffected actor, he came to acting quite by chance. Born in 1927, the son of a chartered surveyor, he went to Highgate School and was working as an accountant when a girlfriend persuaded him to try his hand at Am Dram. He ended up serving an invaluable apprenticeship in rep, and on classic TV series such as The Army Game, The Avengers and The Saint.
By the time he became famous he was already in his fifties, with a lot of real life behind him. It’s no surprise to find he’s been happily married for over half a century, or that his wife, Sally, a health visitor, had an eminently useful and practical career. They have a son and a daughter, Charles and Harriet. Charles, a TV director, is married to Claire Skinner – another down to earth, no-nonsense thespian who positively oozes common sense.
His longest-running hit was As Time Goes By with Judi Dench (a good pal), and it’s a testament to his unassuming skills that it was alongside him that this theatrical grande dame revealed a flair for sitcom. He’s worked with Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier, but don’t you dare call him a luvvie. He’s always been refreshingly self-deprecating about his acting. His CV tells a different story. In the movies, his presence is a sign that you’re in safe hands: Clockwise, A Fish Called Wanda, The Madness of King George…
His voiceovers have become part of the televisual furniture, from ‘ Vorsprung durch Technik’ on those old Audi ads to Grumpy Old Men. Lately, he’s been an eloquent campaigner against HS2. He lives in Berkhamsted, which gives him a vested interest in halting this vainglorious folly, but his passion for the Chilterns is so heartfelt, you feel sure he’d still be opposing it, even if it wasn’t running through his backyard.
‘The older you get, the more there seems to be angry about,’ says his comic alter ego, Ben, in Butterflies, but at the grand old age of ninety, Geoffrey Palmer doesn’t seem angry in the slightest – simply wise.