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Obituary: Dave Atkins
Actor remembered as the pub landlord in Men Behaving Badly

by Gavin Gaughan
The Guardian,
Tuesday May 13 2008

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

batman

A fine purveyor of deadpan delivery .... RIP David.

I wish I had claws.