Raymond Cusick

Raymond Cusick, who has died aged 84, designed the Daleks, the genocidal plunger-toting alien foe of the BBC’s heroic Time Lord, Dr Who.

Ray Cusick with one of his creations

Though the scriptwriter Terry Nation came up with the idea of the Daleks, it was left to Cusick to work out exactly what they would look like. He first considered mechanical creations, but hampered by time constraints and tiny budgets, and wary of technology that was “bound to go wrong” on set, he set about crafting a terrifying being around a human operator.

The process began with the less-than terrifying prospect of a grown-up crouched down on what amounted to a child’s tricycle. For Cusick knew that he wanted the creatures to glide “without visible arms or legs”. “So I drew a seat, 18 inches high, got the operator down on it, then drew round him. It [the Dalek] grew round him.”

As his idea took shape, Cusick explained the look of the monster to colleagues at the BBC. On one occasion, in the canteen, he picked up a condiment container, and steered it around the table, showing how the Daleks’ effortless propulsion could be used to creepy effect. The villains duly became celebrated as the “satanic pepperpots”.

When Dr Who hit British television screens in 1963, the Daleks and their shrieks of “ex-ter-min-ate” did not feature. They made their entrance only in the fifth episode, but had soon etched themselves onto the public consciousness.

Even before then, however, Cusick had a good idea of the effect they might cause. “Before rehearsals started the cast and other members brought their children along and they were shown the Daleks and talked to the Dalek operators,” he recalled. “But then when rehearsals started the operators got into the Daleks and started moving, and at that point all the children screamed and ran out of the studio.”

Such impact was achieved despite the Daleks being distinctly low-budget baddies. Cusick had initially wanted the roundels on the Dalek shell to light up when the creatures became agitated. All that was required were some light bulbs and a car battery. But when he proposed the idea he was told that car batteries would be too expensive. Only when one director complained that he could not tell which Dalek was “talking” was Cusick allowed to introduce an illuminated extra on the Daleks’ domes. Initially these took the form of ping-pong balls. “We never went in for anything elaborate,” said Cusick. “We couldn’t afford it.”

Raymond Patrick Cusick was born in south London in 1928. He enjoyed art at school and began to take evening classes. But his father, then in the RAF, disapproved, preferring Ray to take a course in “something proper” such as civil engineering. Duly enrolled at Borough Polytechnic, Raymond Cusick hated his studies so much that he left to join the Army.

There he fared no better, disliking his spell in Palestine just as much. Returning to Britain, he signed up to a teacher-training course. He taught art, all the while keeping an eye out for positions in the theatre and television, and in the late 1950s he spotted a job with Granada TV and successfully applied. Having giving his notice as a teacher, he appeared for his first day at Granada to be told that there was, in fact, no position available. “So I dashed out and bought another copy of The Stage and there was another job going at Wimbledon Theatre for a designer, so I went there and stayed for nearly three years.”

He moved from Wimbledon to the BBC, starting out as a designer on shows including Sykes and Hugh and I. He had just finished work on a children’s serial entitled Stranger on the Shore when the call came from Dr Who.

Cusick worked on the science-fiction adventure series from 1963 to 1966, but found that he was expected to work “25 hours a day, eight days a week” for “shirt buttons”. Told that “the honour of working for the BBC should be enough” he was, nonetheless, awarded a one-off payment as a reward for the fantastic success of the Daleks. Cusick said it came to £100. Terry Nation’s contract, meanwhile, awarded him royalties and a cut of the highly-lucrative profits from merchandising, netting him tens of thousands of pounds a year.

After a brief spell as a director in the late 1960s, Cusick reverted to art direction, working on such serials as The Pallisers, Duchess of Duke Street, When the Boat Comes In and To Serve Them All My Days.

He retired in 1988, living in Horsham and devoting his time to researching and writing articles about military history, notably the battles of the Napoleonic era.

Raymond Cusick’s wife predeceased him. He is survived by two daughters.

Raymond Cusick, born 1928, died February 21 2013

Kevin Ayers

Kevin Ayers, who has died aged 68, was, as a solo artist and at the helm of Soft Machine, a troubadour of pastoral psychedelic pop music.

Soft Machine: (from left) Kevin Ayers, Robert Wyatt, Mike Ratledge and Daevid Allen

Tall, handsome and hedonistic, he had all the attributes required of the role. He toured with Jimi Hendrix and was friends with Syd Barrett, the founder of Pink Floyd. He was even responsible for the break-up of Richard Branson’s first marriage. But it was with Soft Machine, his own pioneering rock group, that he first came to attention, in 1967. Named after a book by William Burroughs, the band fused genres and maintained a lofty disdain for chart success. Yet the less they cared, the more their influence grew.

Kevin Ayers was born on August 16 1944 in Herne Bay, Kent. His father, Rowan Ayers, was a BBC television producer and minor poet. When Kevin’s parents divorced his mother remarried a civil servant who was stationed in Malaysia, and living in that environment proved an experience that, Ayers said, had a profound effect on him for the rest of his life.

At the age of 12 he was sent back to England, where he was educated at boarding school in Canterbury. Little inclined towards academic pursuits, he was considerably more enthusiastic about music and the incipient bohemian lifestyle that would soon be described as “hippie”.

He befriended like-minded young men and soon they were forming groups. In 1964 Ayers joined The Wilde Flowers, named in honour of Ayers’s hero, Oscar Wilde, alongside drummer Robert Wyatt and bassist Hugh Hopper. But the following year Ayers left the group to go to live on the island of Majorca. While there he met Daevid Allen, an Australian guitarist already versed in Parisian bohemia. Together they returned to Canterbury and formed Soft Machine, Ayers adding Wyatt to the line-up.

Soft Machine were immediately hailed as one of the founders of the British psychedelic music. Playing alongside Pink Floyd, they mixed rock, folk and jazz to create a new, free-form sound that would influence jazz-rock and progressive rock in the 1970s. Signed by Jimi Hendrix’s manager, Soft Machine issued their debut album, Volume One, and spent much of 1968 supporting Hendrix on an extended tour of America.

Such effort proved too much for Ayers, however, who preferred a life of Mediterranean indulgence. Once again he departed the music scene, for life in Ibiza. But his talents had marked him out as a singer and songwriter of note, and EMI’s Harvest label quickly signed him as a solo artist. In 1969 he duly released his first solo album, Joy Of A Toy, on which he demonstrated his odd charm, mixing Noël Coward-esque drollery with gentle psychedelic flavours. Britain’s youthful rock critics were enthusiastic, as was John Peel at the BBC, who championed Ayers on his Radio 1 show.

Flaxen haired, well-spoken and witty, Ayers quickly came to be seen as the golden boy of early-1970s British rock. His albums Shooting At The Moon (1970) and Whatevershebringswesing (1971) were well-received, and featured Ayers backed by a group of friends called The Whole World which included, among others, Robert Wyatt on drums and a teenage Mike Oldfield on guitar. Both albums contained strong, even popular, songs alongside a great deal of sonic experimenting, as Ayers veered from musical hall singalong to dissonant tape loops.

In 1973 Ayers released the album Bananamour – at the time he had a surreal enthusiasm for bananas – and the single Caribbean Moon. Finally he was making radio-friendly music, and after being signed to Chris Blackwell’s influential Island Records and employing John Reid (Elton John’s manager) it seemed he wanted to step beyond his comfortable niche of eccentricity.

The resulting album, The Confessions Of Doctor Dream And Other Stories (1974), positioned Ayers for mainstream success, and a live album cut at London’s Rainbow theatre with Brian Eno, Nico, John Cale and Mike Oldfield, suggested that Ayers was being welcomed into the pantheon of British rock royalty.

Yet with wealth and stardom within his grasp, Ayers again shied away, preferring to head back to the Balearic Islands rather than work at touring and promotion. Pursuing various vices and women in equal measure, he set about enjoying himself. His mid-1970s albums Sweet Deceiver and Yes We Have No Mananas failed to produce the necessary hits and, by the late-1970s, once punk had shaken the British rock establishment, he had largely withdrawn from the spotlight to Deia, Majorca, the village made famous by Robert Graves.

By that time Ayers had met Kristin Tomassi, Richard Branson’s first wife, and begun an affair with her. Though Branson’s marriage was beset by infidelities on both sides, Tomassi’s liaison with Ayers proved an irreparable breach. Together Ayers and Tomassi went on to have a daughter.

In the 1980s, from Deia, Ayers recorded a series of albums that entertained his most loyal followers but did little to suggest that he was anything but a man out of time. His 1992 album Still Life With Guitar was a largely acoustic affair and found him sounding extremely relaxed. It was the last Ayers recording to feature the guitar playing of his friend, Ollie Halsall who would soon die from a drug overdose. Ayers then withdrew almost completely from the world, buying a property in Montolieu, in the South of France (Majorca having become too popular and expensive). There he lived quietly, funded by the trickle of royalties.

Also living in Montolieu was the American artist Timothy Shephard, who befriended Ayers. Shephard, having listened to Ayers’s home-made recordings of new songs, determined to finance an album and set about booking recording sessions with noted younger musicians (including Teenage Fanclub and Euro Child as well as Ayers’s old friends Robert Wyatt and Hugh Hopper). The London label Lo-Max released these recordings as The Unfairground in September 2007, attracting enthusiastic reviews. Tour dates were offered and there was talk of Ayers recording with Blur, but it was not to be.

In an interview that year with The Daily Telegraph in Notting Hill, it was obvious that Ayers would not be taking on further commitments: drinking heavily throughout, he dismissed the idea of performing and appeared traumatised by the new attention. The golden boy of the British underground, now scarred by drink, wanted nothing more than to return to his French village. He did so and did not perform or record again.

Kevin Ayers is survived by his daughter with Kristen Tomassi and by the daughter of another relationship.

Kevin Ayers, born August 16 1944, died February 18 2013

Richard Briers

Richard Briers, the actor, who has died aged 79, played the engaging free spirit who strove for a self-sufficient lifestyle in Surbiton in BBC Television’s classic 1970s comedy series The Good Life.

Briers (left) as Tom Good in The Good Life with Felicity Kendal (Barbara), Paul Eddington (Jerry) and Penelope Keith (Margo) 

Although acclaimed on television for a style of dithering comedy which reminded an earlier generation of the Aldwych farceur Ralph Lynn, Briers also proved adept in serious roles in the classics. In Kenneth Branagh’s 1997 film of Hamlet, his Polonius was praised by one critic for its “conspiratorial edge”.

In The Good Life Briers played the hapless Tom Good, a draughtsman who decided to abandon the office rat race and live off the land. Instead of moving to the country, however, he and his wife Barbara (Felicity Kendal) eviscerated the lawn at their suburban home, planted vegetables and kept livestock — all to the horror of their relentlessly middle-class next door neighbours Margo and Jerry Leadbetter (Penelope Keith and Paul Eddington).

With his omnipresent grin and boyish mannerisms, Briers proved perfect for the role. The Goods’ attempts to be truly self-sufficient were constantly thwarted by the machinations of the snobbish Margo, who feared that they were lowering the tone of the neighbourhood beyond repair; but Tom and Barbara always laughed in the face of adversity, and never lost their affection for their tormentor.

Written by John Esmonde and Bob Larbey and screened in 30 episodes between 1975 and 1978, The Good Life was probably Briers’s most famous vehicle on television. It was “a happy and somewhat rare combination of intelligent writing and superb playing”, judged the television critic of The Daily Telegraph.

From 1984 to 1987 Briers starred in another popular sitcom, Ever Decreasing Circles. Also written by Esmonde and Larbey, it featured an obsessive, middle-aged fusspot whose settled routine is unexpectedly threatened by a flashy rival for his wife’s affections. Penelope Wilton played his long-suffering wife and Peter Egan the too-smooth neighbour.

It all seemed a far cry from Briers’s earnest portrayal of the Dane in a student production at Rada of Hamlet, when his naturally rapid delivery led WA Darlington of The Daily Telegraph to liken him to “a demented typewriter”. Yet with his sense of timing, air of hapless innocence and his ability to keep the straightest of faces amid the mayhem typical of his brand of embarrassed humour, it was no great surprise that Briers went on to become one of Britain’s leading practitioners of farce and light comedy.

Briers continued to be offered television work, and starred as the Rev Philip Lambe in All In Good Faith (1985-88). Lambe, the former vicar of an affluent rural parish, had to knuckle down to life in a tough Midlands city and meet its challenging problems. But after Briers’s conspicuous success at the BBC, this series — his first for ITV — was reckoned a disappointment.

Richard David Briers was born on January 14 1934 at Merton, Surrey. His father, Joe Briers, was, among other things, a bookmaker, but found it hard to hold down a job and frittered away money in pubs. “[He was] a smashing man,” his son recalled, “but he was never settled in one job, and he was not as ambitious or acquisitive as I am. We were always on the edge, so I grew up in a slightly tense atmosphere.”

The family lived at Raynes Park, south-west London, and occasionally received handouts from a wealthy relation. Richard was educated at Ridgeway School in Wimbledon, where he failed to shine scholastically — “I never even got a Z-level” — but showed an interest in acting. The family’s flat overlooked a Rialto cinema, and he could hear the sound of the films playing below. His screen idols as a boy were James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart.

His first job, at 16, was as a filing clerk in the Strand, and after two years he endured “a further two years’ hard grind” doing similar work for the RAF during his National Service. He relieved the boredom by taking part in amateur dramatics and was encouraged in this by the actor Terry-Thomas, his father’s cousin.

Briers was offered a place at Rada, where he was a contemporary of Albert Finney and Peter O’Toole. For the first time in his young life he found himself excelling, and he won Rada’s silver medal for his portrayal of Hamlet. “Until then, I could just see failure staring me in the face,” he recalled. “Now there was a glimmer of hope.”

He made his professional debut at the Playhouse Theatre in Liverpool, where he met his wife, Ann Davies, herself an actress. “My first professional part,” Briers recalled, “was as a botanist who was mad about getting rare plants from America, and I’ve played fanatics on and off ever since.”

After touring in a farce, Something About A Sailor, and spells in rep at Leatherhead and Coventry, Briers made his first London appearance opposite one of the West End’s most famous theatrical couples, John Clements and Kay Hammond, in Lionel Hale’s comedy Gilt And Gingerbread (Duke of York’s, 1959). Other early West End work included Double Yoke (St Martin’s), It’s In The Bag (Duke of York’s) and Noël Coward’s Present Laughter (Queen’s).

Unlike some actors, Briers was not content with the notion of “resting” between jobs. His childhood poverty made him yearn for financial security; he seized every opportunity that came his way, and was careful with his money.

His break into television came in 1962, as a troubled pupil barrister in Henry Cecil’s Brothers In Law in a 13-part adaptation by Frank Muir and Denis Norden. Although he was a success in the first series, he declined to take part in a second, despite being offered double the money. “I wanted to be an actor rather than a TV personality,” he explained, although in the event it was television that drove his career forward.

Created specially for him, Marriage Lines (1963-66) was the series that established him in the public eye. Briers starred as a young man adjusting to married life with his former secretary in a small flat in Earl’s Court, south-west London. The series ran for 45 episodes and helped Briers to establish the amiably enthusiastic comic persona that became his signature.

His stage career continued in parallel, his most notable parts being Mortimer Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace (Vaudeville, 1966); Moon in The Real Inspector Hound (Criterion, 1968); and — two of his favourite roles — as Butley in the play of the same name in 1972, and Sidney Hopcroft in Absurd Person Singular at the Criterion in 1973.

In 1972 Briers returned to Shakespeare in the title role of Richard III on a provincial tour for Toby Robertson’s Prospect Productions. A decade or so later he earned further critical respect, particularly as Hjalmar Ekdal, the naive father in Ibsen’s grim masterpiece The Wild Duck (Lyric, Hammersmith, 1980), and as Uncle Vanya, for Kenneth Branagh’s touring Renaissance Theatre Company.

Briers’s television career continued to flourish with parts in The Other One (1977-79); One-Upmanship (1976-78); and the Alan Ayckbourn trilogy The Norman Conquests (ITV, 1977). When he befriended Kenneth Branagh, the young actor cast Briers in stage productions of Twelfth Night (1987), King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (both 1990) and Coriolanus (1992), and in his film versions of Henry V (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Frankenstein (1994) and In The Bleak Midwinter (1995). Hitherto Briers’s film career had been comparatively low-key, with appearances in A Matter Of Who (1961), All The Way Up (1970) and Rentadick (1972).

Between 2000 and 2005 Briers played the engagingly dotty laird Hector MacDonald in the BBC Television series Monarch of the Glen, alongside Susan Hampshire, Alastair Mackenzie and Julian Fellowes.

Off camera, Briers’s pursuits were essentially suburban: gardening or drinking in the garden, golf, entertaining friends and reading. He took a particular interest in theatre history, and was a member of the Garrick. He published four books, Natter Natter (1981); Coward and Company (1987); A Little Light Weeding (1993); and A Taste of the Good Life (1995).

For many years Briers and his wife divided their time between a house in Bedford Park, west London, designed by Norman Shaw, and a country cottage to which he escaped as often as he could.

He was appointed OBE in 1989 and CBE in 2003.

Diagnosed with emphysema in 2008, he estimated that he had smoked half a million cigarettes before giving up the habit in 2003.

Richard Briers married Ann Davies in 1957; they had two daughters.

Richard Briers, born January 14 1934, died February 17 2013

Tony Sheridan

Tony Sheridan, who has died aged 72, was the hard-driving rock and roll guitarist and singer teamed with the Beatles on their first recording session, when they backed him on the hoary old standard My Bonnie in 1961.

Tony Sheridan in 1961 

The Liverpool foursome ran into Sheridan in Germany, where they had been booked to play the Indra, a sleazy club in the red-light district of Hamburg. Sheridan was the resident British attraction at the nearby Top Ten club, a larger-than-life figure who invariably turned up late, drunk, sometimes with — but often without — his guitar; when he did get himself and his act together, he often forgot the lyrics, and was notoriously unpredictable, tumbling off the stage on to the dance floor where he would moon at the gyrating fans and contort himself into obscene poses.

The Beatles, which then included Pete Best on drums, went to see him play every night after their own show and quickly fell under his spell.

When they moved to the larger Kaiserkeller club nearby, it was Sheridan who directed them up the Reeperbahn to the shop where they kitted themselves out in the sleek black leather Luftwaffe-style bomber jackets and hand-stitched cowboy boots that became their signature “bad boy” look until Brian Epstein became their manager and ordered them into suits.

But more significantly, Sheridan was a decisive influence on the Beatles’ early repertoire, introducing them to R&B records imported from America by artists like Little Richard which Sheridan covered in his own set. The Beatles covered several numbers from these recordings on their own early albums.

For all his shortcomings as a polished act, Sheridan was regarded as a consummate rock musician, wielding a fat-bellied Martin Dreadnought guitar with an electric pickup jammed under the strings as effortlessly if it were a knife and fork, working his sandpaper voice until “it cracked like old plaster” (as one chronicler put it) and hosting wild parties every night in his flat above the club.

When the Top Ten’s young owner offered the Beatles a residency as his house band to accompany Sheridan, they jumped at the chance — even though the contract required them to play for seven hours a night, seven nights a week. Sheridan had no problem fuelling this relentless schedule: he would dole out handfuls of amphetamines called Preludin — known as “prellies” — to keep himself and the Beatles awake.

Backed by the Beatles, Sheridan raised his game. His marathon sets became deafening extravaganzas of rock and roll, and could last for several hours. They attracted the attention of the bandleader and Polydor talent scout Bert Kaempfert, who offered Sheridan a recording contract to include the Beatles as his backing group. Because the German slang word “pidels” — pronounced “peedles” — meant “tiny willies”, Kaempfert changed the group’s name to the Beat Brothers.

Not wishing to alienate his somewhat staid core audience, Kaempfert insisted that the first Sheridan-Beatles recording sessions should cover mainstream standards, which is how My Bonnie came to be released on Polydor in September 1961 with Sheridan taking lead vocal. Another track from the session was When The Saints Go Marching In. The release of My Bonnie was immortalised when Epstein invented the story — now accepted as apocryphal — that he discovered the Beatles when a customer asked for a copy at his Liverpool record shop a few weeks later.

Tony Sheridan was born Anthony Esmond Sheridan McGinnity on May 21 1940 in Norwich. His parents enjoyed classical music, and by the time Tony was seven he had learned to play the violin. At Norwich School he played in the orchestra, sang in the choir, and appeared in productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. In 1956, having also mastered the guitar, he formed a skiffle group and ran away to London, where he was soon playing in the Two I’s club in Old Compton Street, Soho, by night, and sleeping in doorways by day.

His fortunes improved when he appeared on the BBC’s pop show Oh Boy! He was reputedly the first British musician to play the electric guitar on television (the BBC had hitherto banned the instrument), in rock classics such as Blue Suede Shoes and Mighty Mighty Man. The American journalist Bob Spitz later described him as a guitarist of extraordinary flair who, after backing stars like Marty Wilde and Vince Taylor, attracted a sizeable cult following of his own. “His rave 1959 appearance on Oh Boy! was one of those transcendent TV moments in which an unknown performer leaps from obscurity to stardom,” Spitz noted.

Perhaps the calibre of “stardom” he achieved was not recognised by the big names of American rock. When Sheridan performed on a British tour by Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran the following year, he asked if he could travel with them to the next venue. They refused him a ride, which meant he escaped the traffic accident which left Cochran dead and Vincent badly injured.

Later in 1960 Sheridan took a residency at the Kaiserkeller in Hamburg, playing with various British backing musicians, then moving to the glitzier Top Ten club where he met and worked with the Beatles. Their collaboration continued when the Liverpool band returned to Hamburg for a second time the following year, and was sealed when Sheridan and the Beatles cut their first disc together for Polydor, with My Bonnie on the A-side.

“What a silly choice,” Sheridan recalled. “But Bert Kaempfert said we had to do something that the Germans would understand, and they all learnt My Bonnie in English lessons.”

The success of the My Bonnie single was followed by an album of the same name, first in Germany, where it was released with “Tony Sheridan and the Beat Boys” on the cover, and then in Britain, where it was credited to “Tony Sheridan and The Beatles”.

But by the time Sheridan released his solo album Just a Little Bit of Tony Sheridan in 1964, he had moved away from rock and roll to a bluesier, jazzier sound. In any case he had been dismayed by the hysteria of the Beatlemania phenomenon and felt drawn to the political and social problems of the day. According to the album’s liner notes, Sheridan planned to visit the southern United States “to hear at first hand the original Negro music and experience the atmosphere that has been instrumental in creating Negro jazz and the spiritual, for which he has a great liking”.

During the Vietnam War, Sheridan performed for American troops with a specially-formed band, one of whose members was killed by enemy fire. Initially, the Reuters news agency reported that Sheridan himself had died, and newspapers worldwide published his obituary. For his work entertaining the military, Sheridan was appointed an honorary captain of the US Army, and presented with an Army Ranger cap which he subsequently often wore on stage.

Sheridan released a new album called Vagabond in 2002, mostly of his own material, but also including a new cover version of Skinny Minnie, a rocker number he had recorded for his first album nearly 40 years earlier.

Songs from that 1961 session, including My Bonnie, have been reissued many times, most recently by Time-Life as The Beatles With Tony Sheridan First Recordings: 50th Anniversary Edition in 2011.

Last year, a few weeks after he made a rare concert appearance — at the 2012 Beatlefair in San Diego, California — Sheridan underwent heart surgery in Germany.

Tony Sheridan is survived by his wife, Anna, and a son from an earlier marriage, the rockabilly musician Tony Sheridan Jr.

Tony Sheridan, born May 21 1940, died February 16 2013

Rick Huxley

Rick Huxley, who has died aged 72, played bass guitar with the Dave Clark Five, one of the British pop groups which enjoyed spectacular success in the mid-1960s.

Rick Huxley (left) with other members of The Dave Clark Five

Best known for their hits Bits And Pieces and Glad All Over (the latter still has a regular airing as the anthem of Crystal Palace football fans), the Dave Clark Five followed the Beatles as one of the leading bands of the “British invasion” which took America by storm after 1964. They had 14 consecutive Top 10 hits in the United States, and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show shortly after the Beatles.

Glad All Over reached No 1 in the British singles chart in January 1964 (it made No 6 in America), and later that year the group went to No 2 in the UK with Bits And Pieces. Among their other hits were Catch Us If You Can and a cover of The Contours’ Do You Love Me?

Richard Huxley was born on August 5 1942 at Dartford, Kent (the birthplace a year later of both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards). In 1958, when he was 16, he answered an advertisement for a guitarist in the line-up of a band led by the drummer Dave Clark — at this early stage the group featured Mick Ryan on lead guitar and Jim Spencer on saxophone.

Within 18 months the band was proving popular on the Mecca Ballroom circuit, mainly with their covers of American R&B standards. By the early 1960s the line-up that would become famous was in place: Clark on drums; Mike Smith on keyboards and lead vocals; Lenny Davidson (lead guitar and vocals); Denis Payton (saxophone, harmonica, guitar and vocals); and Huxley on bass, vocals and occasional acoustic guitar.

In 1963 the group moved from the Pye label to EMI, and in late 1963 they released Glad All Over, written by Clark and Smith, which took the top spot in the charts immediately after the Beatles’ I Want to Hold Your Hand.

By 1967 the Dave Clark Five had been left behind by musical fashion, although in November that year they reached No 2 in the UK singles chart with Everybody Knows. In 1970 the group split up, Huxley later recalling: “Dave called us all to a meeting at his flat, and we mutually agreed to call it a day.”

For two years Huxley worked for Vox, which supplied amplifiers to the Beatles, Rolling Stones and the Kinks among other bands. From 1973 to 1987 he and a friend, Doug Jackson, ran Music Equipment, a company based in Camberwell, south London. Huxley then earned his living in the electrical wholesaling business.

In 2008 the Dave Clark Five were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame.

Huxley, formerly a heavy smoker, had suffered from emphysema. His wife, Ann, died last year. The only surviving members of the group are Dave Clark and Lenny Davidson — Denis Payton died in 2006 and Mike Smith in 2008.

Rick Huxley, born August 5 1942, died February 11 2013

Peter Gilmore

Peter Gilmore, who has died aged 81, starred in the long-running BBC seafaring drama The Onedin Line which attracted Sunday night audiences of millions in the 1970s.

Peter Gilmore as James Onedin 

Between 1971 and 1980 his portrayal of the mutton-chopped Victorian shipowner James Onedin offered a welcome weekly escape from reality during a period of economic gloom. With its stirring theme tune — the majestic Adagio from Khachaturyan’s ballet Spartacus — the series followed the precarious fortunes of a family-run Liverpool shipping line in the second half of the 19th century.

At first The Onedin Line made little impact, and it was only midway through the second series in 1972 that the ratings suddenly soared to 12 million viewers a week. “Gilmore’s fan mail leapt to mammoth proportions,” one critic reported. “Women, he discovered, seem to fall for hard and heartless men.”

As the ruthlessly ambitious, handsome young captain of the decrepit three-masted schooner Charlotte Rhodes, Gilmore certainly caught the determined, dogged spirit of the age of sail just as steam began contending for ocean-going supremacy. The series tracked James Onedin’s professional and personal ups-and-downs — not least his various romantic entanglements which, with the character’s rugged, freebooting style, charmed a large contingent of female viewers.

Men, on the other hand, while acknowledging Gilmore’s gruff appeal, were enthralled as much by the sight of the Charlotte Rhodes under full sail on an open blue sea as they were by Gilmore’s alluring co-stars, among them Onedin’s bewitching sister Elizabeth (Jessica Benton).

In 1993 Gilmore visited post-Ceaucescu Romania, where The Onedin Line — a saga of capitalist enterprise — was the most popular show on television. He was feted with all the trappings of a state visit, whisked around in black limousines. The authorities in Bucharest, who had reportedly bought the series from the BBC for just £40, screened repeat after repeat.

In all, the show was sold to 70 countries. President Tito of Yugoslavia used to rearrange the national television schedules so that he could catch up with it before bed.

The son of a commercial traveller, John Peter Gilmore was born on August 25 1931 in Leipzig, but from the age of six was brought up at Nunthorpe, a suburb of Middlesbrough. Educated at the Friends’ School in nearby Great Ayton, he left at the age of 14 to work in a factory in London. After National Service in the Army, he enrolled in 1952 at Parada, a preparatory course for Rada; he lasted for two terms before being expelled — “mainly, I suspect, because I was no good”.

Gilmore began his stage career as a vocalist, appearing with the George Mitchell Singers in summer seasons with Harry Secombe and the comedian Al Read. Between 1954 and 1956 he played in the popular Crazy Gang revue Jokers Wild (Victoria Palace). From the mid-1950s he also made television commercials in Germany, Ireland and the United States.

After working in provincial stage productions, with occasional London dates, stardom beckoned in 1958 when he was cast as Freddy Eynsford Hill in the West End production of My Fair Lady (Theatre Royal, Drury Lane). At the last minute, however, he was replaced because he was a baritone and the score called for a tenor.

His big television break came the same year in the ITV series Ivanhoe, in which he worked with the executive producer Peter Rogers, later to develop the Carry On comedy canon. Gilmore made several appearances in Carry On films, including Carry On Jack (1963) and Carry On Cleo (1964), both of which afforded him seaborne roles, as well as Carry On Up The Khyber (1968) and Carry On Henry (1971).

He also appeared in the ghoulish British horror film The Abominable Doctor Phibes (also 1971) as well as in several West End musical stage successes such as Lock Up Your Daughters (Mermaid, 1962) and The Beggar’s Opera (Apollo, 1968), in which Gilmore, as the highwayman Macheath, was praised for his “spirited voice and handsome presence”.

On television he made appearances in popular television drama series such as The Persuaders, The Ruth Rendell Mysteries and Heartbeat. In 1984 he played Chief Orderly Brazen in the four-part Doctor Who story Frontios.

Peter Gilmore married, in 1958, the actress Una Stubbs, who was in the chorus of My Fair Lady. Their marriage was dissolved in 1969, and the following year he married Jan Waters, with whom he starred in The Beggar’s Opera on stage and on television.

After they divorced in 1976 he lived with Anne Stallybrass, who also played his wife in The Onedin Line; they married in 1987. She and an adopted son from his first marriage survive him.

Peter Gilmore, born August 25 1931, died February 3 2013

Reg Presley

Reg Presley, who has died aged 71, was lead singer with The Troggs, the pop group which notched up seven huge hits in the mid-1960s, notably Wild Thing; in later years, he became an idiosyncratic philosopher and student of intergalactic travel.

The Troggs - Reg Presley, Chris Britton, Pete Staples and Ronnie Bond 

His bold and highly original belief system, described in his 2002 book, Wild Things They Don’t Tell Us, concentrated principally on alien abductions, crop circles, and what he saw as the close relationship between UFOs and ancient monuments. Presley also developed a scheme designed to reclaim deserts and even patented a fog-warning system.

The Troggs’ vertiginous climb to fame had spanned 18 months, a relatively brief period during which they achieved all seven of their British chart successes, including Any Way That You Want Me and With a Girl Like You; thereafter the band’s popularity hit a sticky patch which lasted in excess of 40 years.

This slow descent from celebrity was dramatically interrupted in 1994, however, when Presley’s composition Love is all Around, a Top 10 hit for The Troggs 27 years earlier, was covered by the Scottish group Wet Wet Wet and used on the soundtrack of the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. It reached No 1 and remained there for what seemed an eternity – in fact, 15 weeks.

Reginald Maurice Ball – his unenviable pseudonym was given to him in 1965 by the celebrated publicist Keith Altham – was born in Andover, Hampshire, on June 12 1941. After school he joined the building trade, where he began a career as a bricklayer – a job he abandoned only when Wild Thing entered the Top 10 in 1966. The group’s name, an abbreviation of Troglodyte, was intended to communicate rugged sexuality. Unfortunately, as Presley observed, the title served instead as a gateway to derision.

“Paul McCartney,” he complained, “would always refer to me as 'Reg Trogg’.”

The Troggs’ brief but intense flirtation with mainstream success was engineered by Larry Page, who turned to production after mixed reactions to his own short-lived performing career as “Larry Page the Teenage Rage”. It was Page (also the guiding influence behind Chelsea FC’s Blue is the Colour) who had the idea of persuading The Troggs to record Wild Thing. The song, which would become an anthem for Jimi Hendrix, was written by James Wesley Voight, younger brother of the actor Jon, under the name of Chip Taylor.

Presley recalled: “When I heard those lyrics: 'Wild thing. You make my heart sing. You make everything groovy,’ I just thought: 'Oh my God. What has Larry done to us?’”

Page dressed his protégés in loud striped suits and urged them to maintain an impeccable image offstage. Presley, a moderate drinker who smoked, by his own estimation, an average of 80 a day for most of his life, never took illegal drugs. But Page was also particularly insistent that the group refrain from swearing. With time, the musicians found this stricture more difficult to adhere to.

In the late 1960s, a studio engineer secretly kept the tape rolling while The Troggs were airing musical differences between takes. The recording begins on an optimistic note, with one member explaining that: “This is a f------ number one. It f------ is. This is a number f------ one, and if this bastard don’t go, I f------ retire. I f------ do. Bollocks. But it f------ well won’t be unless we spend a little bit of f------ thought and imagination to f------ make it a f------ number one. You’ve got to sprinkle a little bit of f------ fairy dust over the bastard.”

Later in the discussion (ironically the song in question, never released, was entitled Tranquillity) a note of disharmony begins to creep in. Presley offers some advice to Ronnie Bond, the band’s drummer. “You can say that,” Bond responds, “all f------ night. Just shut your f------ mouth for five minutes. Don’t keep f------ ranting down that f------ microphone. F--- me, Reg. Just f--- off and let me keep going f------ through it. I know it ain’t f------ right. I can f------ hear it ain’t right you ----. F--- me. When I f------ hear it in my f------ head, that that’s what I’ve gotta f------ do, then I’ll do it. You big pranny.”

“The Troggs’ Tapes”, as the bootlegged session became known, became one of their most enduringly popular recordings. Parodied in a scene of Rob Reiner’s 1984 comedy This is Spinal Tap, it was eventually issued legally, as a bonus CD in Archaeology, a 1992 boxed set of the group’s collected works. “I was a bit annoyed about the tape at the time,” Reg Presley said, “because it was a while before we knew it even existed. We found out in a pub, in west London. This bloke came up to us and said: 'You’re the Troggs, aren’t you? Have a listen to this.’”

Presley was informed that pirated copies of the 11-minute tape, unpurged of its 114 expletives, had been eagerly purchased by his rivals in the music business, and that black market vendors were reporting a more satisfactory level of customer feedback than was usual with a Troggs recording.

This was unfair. For Wild Thing, With a Girl Like You and Any Way That You Want Me were outstanding singles which inspired a host of performers, including Iggy Pop. The late American writer Lester Bangs even went so far as to publish a 25,000 word eulogy to The Troggs, which hailed them as the godfathers of punk and called their music “holy”. At one point Bangs, whose critical instincts occasionally betrayed his prodigious consumption of narcotics, compared Reg Presley to Marcel Proust.

But the Andover group’s short-lived success betrayed the fact that The Troggs struggled to rival the lyrical invention of the Beatles, The Who or the Rolling Stones. Reg Presley’s lines included: “A boy’s not a girl and a man’s not a man till he’s been with a girl like my Joanne”, and “My lady owns an oil well. Just one look, and you can tell.” Another Presley composition has the chorus: “I’ll buy you an island – out in the sea” and that, as one unforgiving reviewer noted, “is the best kind of island there is”.

In 1987, when his fortunes were hardly at their zenith, Presley was hailed by Bob Dylan on the set of Richard Marquand’s film Hearts of Fire, in which the leader of the Troggs was appearing as an extra. “I had this guitar around my neck,” Presley told a reporter. “Dylan recognised me. He came up and said: 'How long have you been playing the guitar?’ I said, 'All bloody afternoon, mate.’”

“I have always liked Reg,” his friend Keith Altham said, “because he has an innocence about him, in a profession dominated by people who are self-important and unreceptive. Even when he is wrong, he is sincerely wrong. He is very likeable. His interests are harmless. He is not mad.”

This last assertion may have been a reference to Presley’s interest in flying saucers, which increased exponentially with age. But for years his fascination with such subjects had outstripped his ability to fund “research”. Then, in 1992, Love is All Around was covered by REM and in the same year the American band collaborated on an album with The Troggs, entitled Athens Andover. (The project, facilitated by Larry Page, is not broadly seen as either band’s finest hour.) Two years later, after Four Weddings and a Funeral, further substantial royalties from Love is All Around enabled Presley to devote huge amounts of time and resources to personal investigations of what he felt were neglected areas of science — notably alien spacecraft, lost civilisations and alchemy.

It seems his life outside music had been unremarkable until Saturday, June 1 1974. “It was lunchtime,” he recalled. “I saw a news bulletin about a fire in Flixborough. It described how the blaze was melting windows half a mile away. I tell my wife about it. Six o’clock, I turn on the news again, and it says the explosion only happened at eight minutes to five. How did I see a report about a disaster four hours before it happened? Could the broadcast signal have been affected by gravity?”

There was nothing delusional about Reg Presley; his routine life, which he shared with Brenda, his wife of 49 years, was one of utter normality, in a modest house on the outskirts of Andover. Sitting by the fire in his living room, or over a steak pie and a pint in his favourite pub, The Barge, in nearby Pewsey Vale, he would speak with undisguised envy of famous alien abductees: people such as George Adamski, who was said to have been taken by aliens on a day trip to Venus, and PC Alan Godfrey of the West Yorkshire constabulary, who was given a medical on a spaceship.

When discussing space travel, Presley tended to depart from the standard vernacular, referring to interstellar craft as “the bugger” or “the bastard”, and to interplanetary communications systems as “tackle”. In 1994 he claimed to have obtained footage of a metallic disc seen hovering over crops, an object which, he said, was “nosin’ around at corn height”, and “sniffin’ around the field”. This, he argued, was “one of the little fellers – the ones with the big cow eyes, which in UFO circles we call the greys. I’ve got a sneaking feeling that they are engineered by aliens who can see the future; if they know a woman is going to lose a baby they take it and they convert it. They put in a bit of extra brain. Maybe no vocal. But they can mind-read you.”

If an alien craft landed and offered to abduct him, Presley reflected in 2006, “I hope I would have the bottle to go. Because I’d like to ask them a lot of bloody questions. And they’ve probably got all the answers. These beings may be 20 million years in advance of us. What kind of technology must they have? You could come back to earth and not know a soul on the planet. But perhaps you would have seen something that would help save the whole human race. And maybe some people have done that.”

Towards the end of his life he became fascinated by the possible benefits of ingesting powdered gold: a substance which belongs to a family known as ORMEs (orbitally rearranged monatomic elements), and for which extraordinary claims continue to be made on numerous websites devoted to modern alchemy.

Presley believed that white, powdered gold could have been “fed by the Egyptians to the Pharaohs. I tried to manufacture it myself. You need the temperature of the sun to make it. So I went down to the iron foundry in Andover. You zap the gold at the temperature of the sun. Then you look in the crucible and there is only white dust left.”

He never moved away from Andover. In his later years, he could increasingly be found organising nocturnal expeditions, scouring the rural landscape with binoculars in the hope of contacting extraterrestrials, even though other locals considered it unlikely that alien super beings on urgent business would spurn the United Nations, or the White House, and instead make straight for the vocalist from The Troggs.

Presley remained a kindly, highly approachable man. His florid complexion, stocky figure and amiable disposition gave little clue as to his connection with rock and roll or his preoccupation with esoteric science. Before he first fell ill with a serious stroke in September 2010, The Troggs had been entertaining large audiences at festivals in Belgium and Germany, countries where their legacy was especially well-appreciated.

On tour he was never pompous, or dismissive of people who admired him. He did not boast of orchestral abilities he did not possess. Neither, in old age, did he ever take to the stage with the preposterous swagger of an old man striving to replicate the effortless agility of youth.

Reg Presley had great hopes of his powdered white gold, a little of which he used to place under his tongue every day. He did once say that, in time, he believed it might prolong a man’s life indefinitely. “It’s possible,” he remarked. “One day. Only time will tell.”

He is survived by his wife, and a son and daughter.

Reg Presley, born June 12 1941, died February 4 2012