Dave Atkins; Actor remembered as the pub landlord in Men Behaving Badly
Hyfler/Rosner
Actor remembered as the pub landlord in Men Behaving Badly
Gavin Gaughan
The Guardian,
Tuesday May 13 2008
Photo:
http://www.sitcom.co.uk/men_badly/graphics/char_les.jpg
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