The actor Kenneth Cope, who has died aged 93, was more of a household face than a household name insofar as he was primarily associated with three roles in wildly successful television series: the street trader Jed Stone in Coronation Street (1961-66; returning in 2008-09); the ghostly private detective Marty Hopkirk in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1969-70); and Ray Hilton in Brookside (1999-2002).
He was, however, plain Kenneth Cope, a likely lad with an impish manner in a smart grey suit, in one of the most groundbreaking, if short-lived, BBC television programmes of the last century, the Saturday-night satire show That Was The Week That Was, or TW3, hosted by David Frost and produced by Ned Sherrin for two series (a total of 37 shows, each running for 50 minutes) in 1962 and 1963.
The stars of TW3, apart from Frost himself – rising, as Peter Cook said, “without trace”, from obscurity – were the singers Millicent Martin and Lance Percival, and the journalist Bernard Levin. But the acting ballast, the sharp delivery of sketches and the spot-on comic timing was the province of Cope, Willie Rushton, Roy Kinnear and Al Mancini.
The show, like Beyond the Fringe, signalled the end of the age of deference, and Cope excelled at registering the contemptuously uncomprehending facial expressions of the ordinary Joe’s victim status at the hands of officialdom, snobbery and incompetence.
Although this priceless quality of man-in-the-street naturalism, added to his easy charm, could be twisted in off-colour character roles, Cope was mostly the chirpy good guy. And, as a sharp-witted Liverpudlian, he branched out as a restaurateur, disc jockey and scriptwriter.
He wrote the inaugural sitcom, Thingumybob (1968), for the new London Weekend Television franchise on ITV. The show not only starred a septuagenarian Stanley Holloway as a pensioner with time on his hands for a little light mischief, but also had a theme tune by Paul McCartney.
Cope, born in Wavertree, Liverpool, was one of five children born to an engineer father. He left Holt high school at 15 and spent three years as an apprentice toolmaker before winning a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic theatre school in 1950.
On graduating, he joined the Bristol Old Vic company, led by John Neville , and appeared in Measure for Measure and Henry V, the latter also on tour.
By 1953, he was a television regular in popular programmes such as Billy Bunter, Dixon of Dock Green, Ivanhoe (starring Roger Moore) and, in 1956, the first series (“Six of the Best”) of Whack-O!, scripted by Frank Muir and Denis Norden, in which he played an eager young English teacher, Mr FD Price-Whittaker, at the mercy, along with his pupils, of the vagaries and depredations of Jimmy Edwards in mortarboard, gown and bushy moustache as the cane-wielding, half-drunken head of a minor public school on the slide.
As he launched himself into Coronation Street at the beginning of the 1960s, Cope made his only appearance at the Royal Court in London, in Shelagh Delaney’s second play, The Lion in Love. Although Levin liked it, not many critics thought it a worthy follow-up to Delaney’s smash-hit A Taste of Honey, though Cope featured in a strong cast in a northern family drama.
That cast also included Renny Lister, whom Cope married in 1961, shortly after she joined him on the set of Corrie as his girlfriend, Jean Stark.
Playing Jed Stone had two consequences: he made a novelty pop single with Tony Hatch called Hands Off, Stop Muckin’ About, which led to a short contract as a disc jockey on Radio Luxembourg; and, with the producer Peter Eckersley, he wrote a couple of episodes of the sitcom Turn Out the Lights (1967), starring Arthur Lowe as Leonard Swindley, his Coronation Street character, adopting the role of an amateur sleuth in a wacky world of seances and poltergeists. In 1968 he also wrote an episode for Jack Rosenthal’s comedy series The Dustbinmen.
Cope moved to a new level of celebrity with Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), made by ITC for ITV. His canny private detective, in cooperative cahoots with Mike Pratt’s Jeff Randall, was killed in the first episode and returned thereafter with special powers (and special effects) in a white suit and wig. The show became a cult series of 26 episodes, sold in more than 30 territories.
When he moved with his family to Oxfordshire in the 70s, he opened two restaurants, Martha’s Kitchen in Watlington, and Edwards in Eynsham, near Witney, offering a free bottle of wine to any member of Equity who crossed the threshold. He proudly declared that Laurence Olivier went home one evening with a bottle of Frascati under his arm.
He was occasionally lured into the movie studios, appearing in two of the best Carry On films, Carry On at Your Convenience (1971), set in a cartoon world of industrial relations, and Carry On Matron (1972), lorded over by Hattie Jacques with Kenneth Williams snapping at her heels as an unlikely and importunate consultant. In the first, Cope was Vic Spanner, an obnoxious shop steward and, in the second, Cyril Carter, son of Sid James, forced to “drag up” in female nurse attire as part of his dad’s attempt to raid a maternity hospital for contraceptives.
He found respite from the Carry On carry-on by writing three series of a children’s TV programme, Striker, which was partly inspired by his involvement, through his sons, with the youth football team in his local village of Islip. He also contributed scripts to The Squirrels (1974-76), a comedy series of office-politicking with Bernard Hepton as the autocratic boss, and A Sharp Intake of Breath (1978-81), starring David Jason as a buffeted non-entity before he hit his stride as Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses.
Cope turned up in numerous major TV series, notably Doctor Who – as Packard in the 1981 Warriors’ Gate story, with Tom Baker in the Tardis – Casualty, The Bill, Minder and Kavanagh QC. One of his least successful ventures was a scouse western spoof, Bootle Saddles, in 1984 (it lasted one season), in which he played a Blackpool boarding house manager who sells up to build a western town, Apache Wells, in the Derbyshire countryside.
He was mistakenly diagnosed with lung cancer in 2000 when what he had – as if that were not enough – was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He reappeared as an elderly Jed in Coronation Street in 2008, after a 42-year absence, refusing to leave his home to placate a ruthless property developer; he ended up assaulted and stuffed in a hamper for his pains. Seven years later, his daughter Martha Cope appeared in the same series as Joanne, the date of Kevin Webster (Michael Le Vell). In his later years, Cope lived in Southport with Renny.
She survives him, along with their three children, Martha, Nick and Mark.
• Kenneth Charles Cope, actor and scriptwriter, born 14 April 1931; died 11 September 2024
• This article was amended on 13 September 2024. Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) ran to 26 episodes, not 46, and was an ITC production for ITV, not BBC.
