Daily Telegraph

14/07/2008

Hugh Lloyd was the lugubrious comic actor best known as Tony Hancock's woebegone sidekick in Hancock's Half Hour and later as Terry Scott's meek flatmate in Hugh and I.

Although Lloyd accepted parts in productions as diverse as Alan Bennett's A Visit from Miss Protheroe and the detective series Charlie, he always claimed he was happiest in "cheerless underdog parts".

It is not surprising then that Lloyd considered as particular triumphs the role of a mournful worm in James and the Giant Peach and that of a concrete garden ornament in The Gnomes of Dulwich.

He drew inspiration from his childhood hero Stan Laurel. "I saw Laurel and Hardy on stage," he recalled, "and they were brilliant. They were real professionals, economical, they didn't do anything unless it was funny."

Lloyd admired Laurel's deadpan humour and emulated it in his own act. "I can't stand comedians who laugh at their own jokes," he insisted. "Stan Laurel never did, and he never needed to offend anybody to get a laugh."

Lloyd always preferred working in television, a medium which suited his technique of underplaying his characters. "I never liked the theatre that much," he remembered. "Terry Scott was always much better at it than me; he liked to dominate the stage, I wanted to stand still."

Despite Lloyd's physique (he was short, overweight and balding and was once described as looking like "a melancholic mole") he received a considerable amount of mail from female fans.

"I think they take one look at my face," he recalled, "bearing all the marks of human suffering, and they think I need mothering." Undeterred by three previous divorces, Lloyd was married for the fourth time in 1983 to a woman 30 years his junior.

Hugh Lewis Lloyd was born on April 22 1923 and brought up in Chester, the son of a tobacco factory manager. The Lloyds were strict Methodists and disapproved of their son's childhood ambitions of becoming a comedian. "Every holiday in Llanfairfechan I used to spend the day watching the pier-end concert party," he recalled, "then I'd tell my parents I'd been playing on the beach."

At the outbreak of the Second World War Lloyd left the King's School, Chester, and instead of becoming a comic, as he had hoped, started work as a cub reporter on the Chester Chronicle. "My father was dead against the stage," he remembered. "He thought it was too insecure and persuaded me into journalism instead."

As a reporter Lloyd spent most of his time reviewing local theatrical performances. When he began putting on his own amateur productions he reported those as well. "I never had such good reviews again," he admitted. "I was forever drawing attention to myself as 'this promising young comedian'."

In a scene reminiscent of his later television sketches, Lloyd was declared unfit for military service and classed 3C because he suffered from hay fever. He did, however, join Ensa, and toured extensively throughout the war with variety shows. During his time with Ensa he met and married his first wife, but the marriage proved unsuccessful and the couple were divorced almost immediately.

By the end of the war Lloyd had given up journalism to become a full-time comic. He toured Britain in summer variety shows and pantomimes before finding a job as a "spot comic" at the Windmill Theatre. "My early performances were disastrous," he remembered. "I deliberately didn't laugh at my own jokes, but neither did the audience."

Lloyd began his association with Tony Hancock when he was offered several "one-liners" in the radio show Hancock's Half Hour in 1954. After joining Hancock on a tour of Cyprus, Malta and Tripoli, entertaining the troops there, Lloyd and Hancock became close friends. "I've never worked with anyone like him before or since," he recalled, "Tony was a one-off, a really talented actor."

On their return to Britain Hancock offered Lloyd much larger parts in the television version of Hancock's Half Hour in 1956. Lloyd played "the patient in the next bed" in one of Hancock's best-known episodes "The Blood Donor". He went on to co-star in over 30 sketches including "The Librarian", "The Lift" and "The Reunion".

"We worked well together because Tony came over as a very dominating character," Lloyd remembered, "and I was always the underdog, being put upon."

Lloyd recalled that recording in the studio with Hancock remained fraught with tension. "He was always so afraid he'd forget his lines, he'd learn the whole thing before rehearsals started," Lloyd remembered, "then as rehearsals went on, he'd get more and more nervous and forget more and more of his part until the day of filming.We'd have to have his lines pinned up all over the set."

As Lloyd became increasingly popular with viewers his friendship with Hancock began to deteriorate. "I think he wanted you to be part of his team," Lloyd recalled, "if you did anything else he just lost interest."

Lloyd stopped working with Hancock in the late 1950s, although he did appear as Ted (one half of a Punch and Judy act) in Hancock's film The Punch and Judy Man in 1963. "By then Tony had begun to think of himself as a philosopher," Lloyd recalled. "He was morose and rather too fond of the bottle."

In 1962 Hugh Lloyd starred in his own series opposite Terry Scott. Lloyd and Scott first met during the war and worked together in variety shows in the early 1950s. They reformed their partnership for the long-running situation comedy Hugh and I, which both maintained was based on exaggerated versions of themselves.

Lloyd reprised the type of character he had played with Hancock; lugubrious, meek and constantly under attack from the bludgeoning Scott. "I'm really only interested in playing one character," Lloyd insisted, "but I want to play him better and better."

Written by John Chapman, Hugh and I ran for four years on BBC Television. When not filming Lloyd and Scott continued to perform together in pantomimes, often as the Ugly Sisters in Cinderella. "I don't like being too obvious," Lloyd maintained, "when I appear in skirts in panto I'm usually not very happy, unlike Terry who absolutely loves it."

In 1969 he returned to situation comedy in the bizarre BBC series The Gnomes of Dulwich. Lloyd, again paired with Scott, played a bearded "fishing gnome". He spent most of each episode sitting perfectly still in front of a plastic garden pond. As usual, Scott played the belligerent, argumentative lead with Lloyd as his morose, deadpan foil.

After splitting with Scott in the late 1960s Lloyd concentrated on perfecting his underdog character. He appeared in a Comedy Playhouse production, Hughie, as a recently released prisoner finding life outside prison confusing and complex.

By the 1970s Hugh Lloyd was firmly established as a comic actor. He made his West End debut in 1970 in When We are Married at the Strand Theatre opposite Peggy Mount and Fred Emney. Lloyd's partnership with the imposing Peggy Mount was so successful that they appeared together the following year in the situation comedy Lollipop Loves Mr Mole.

Later in 1971 Lloyd left for Australia, where he appeared in a departure from his usual roles in the ill-fated comedy The Virgin Fellas, which dealt with the lives of two British immigrants trying to make a fortune in Australia's nickel mines. The programme had a disastrous reception and was attacked by critics for featuring "sniggering sex jokes".

It was surprising that Lloyd accepted the part at all, given that in the past he had turned down work which he considered "too blue" and that he regularly appeared on radio and television to discuss his views on Christianity (he remained a Methodist throughout his life).

In 1972 Lloyd returned to more familiar ground with runs in Robin Hood (as one of the two robbers, with Terry Scott) and later in Dick Whittington (as the Dame opposite Jimmy Tarbuck as Dick). Lloyd recalled getting "one of the biggest laughs of my career" when he "plunged headlong" off the stage into the percussion section of the orchestra. "He came on," the theatre manager remembered, "said 'Hallo boys and girls' and disappeared." Lloyd was taken to hospital after cutting his head on one of the cymbals.

By the late 1970s Hugh Lloyd was accepting fewer broad comedy roles and concentrated instead on characterisation. He appeared in 1978 in the Ortonesque comedy The Ballad of Wilfred II.

Lloyd played a man who, having placed an advertisement in the lonely hearts column, feels compelled to marry the appalling woman who answers it. She later renames him Wilfred after her first husband, cooks him 'Wilfred's' favourite dinners and eventually transforms him into a carbon copy of her previous spouse.

In Alan Bennett's A Visit from Miss Protheroe (1978) Lloyd played Mr Dodsworth, a retired filing clerk who is slowly dying in hospital. He receives a visit from Miss Protheroe (Patricia Routledge) who happily informs him that the filing system he invented has been completely revised by his dynamic replacement Mr Skinner. Lloyd's meek portrayal of the dying man and Routledge's determinedly cheerful secretary lent an air of pathos to the production.

Having tried farce in 1980 (in Consider My Position) and 1981 (in Dandy Dick) Lloyd appeared in the sophisticated Noël Coward triple bill Tonight at 8.30.

Lloyd won new fans with his performances as a conductor who ruins a performance in Red Peppers and as an unexpected and forgotten guest in Hands Across the Sea.

After appearing in another Bennett play, Say Something Happened (1982), in which he starred with Thora Hird and Julie Walters, Lloyd made another departure from his more familiar roles to appear in the detective series Charlie opposite David Warner.

In 1983, at the age of 60, Hugh Lloyd was married for the fourth time to 30-year-old Shän Davies. He had married and divorced for the second time in the early 1950s and for the third time in the late 1960s.

Throughout the 1980s Lloyd continued to play a similar type of character, although in very different productions. In 1984 he played an inmate of an old peoples' home who upsets the equilibrium when he proposes to Brenda Bruce. In 1985 he made his debut in "straight theatre", playing the butler in the National Theatre production of The Cherry Orchard. In 1990 he appeared as another butler in Thark at the Lyric, Hammersmith.

"It was my third one," he remembered, "if you count Dandy Dick, so now I look with suspicion on other actors in butler roles." The show was to have transferred to the West End but the Savoy Theatre burned down before opening night.

When not performing Lloyd spent his time at his home, a 16th-century cottage in Surrey. He remained a supporter of Chester City and maintained an avid interest in newspapers and politics. "I think it started in 1928," he recalled, "when, as a child of five, I was patted on the head by Lloyd George."

Hugh Lloyd, who was appointed MBE in 2006, is survived by his widow, Shän, and his second wife, the musician José Stewart.