The actor Richard Franklin, who has died aged 87, was an essential part of the long-running BBC TV series Doctor Who during one of its most-loved periods, with Jon Pertwee as the third incarnation of the Time Lord. Franklin debuted in the 1971 serial Terror of the Autons as the dashing Capt Mike Yates, bringing authenticity (he had served as a captain in the territorial army’s Queen Victoria’s Rifles), a natural military bearing and an appealing twinkle to the part.
With the Doctor exiled to Earth and serving as unpaid scientific adviser to UNIT (the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce), a regular lineup of supporting characters was needed. Yates was originally introduced as a possible love interest for the Doctor’s new companion Jo Grant (Katy Manning), but romance never quite blossomed.
Instead he enjoyed some interesting character development, eventually betraying the Doctor in Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974), idealistically allying himself with a group of misguided liberals trying to return Earth to a pre-technological golden age. Franklin always felt the character to be misguided rather than treacherous.
In his last regular story, Planet of the Spiders (1974), Yates achieved redemption when he stumbled across malignant intelligent arachnids infesting the Buddhist retreat where he had sought enlightenment.
Franklin never severed ties with the show, and returned in the celebratory 20th anniversary story The Five Doctors (1983), and a Children in Need special, Dimensions in Time (1993). He also wrote, directed and appeared in a spin-off caper, Recall UNIT (1984), at the Edinburgh Fringe, wrote a novel featuring Yates called The Killing Stone (released as an audiobook in 2002 and retitled Operation HATE when published in print in 2013) and starred in audio productions for both Big Finish and the BBC (the latter teaming Yates with the fourth Doctor, Tom Baker).
Yates was not his only television success – in 1988 he joined Emmerdale Farm as the ruthless businessman Denis Rigg, who quickly developed into a hated villain before being given a suitably grisly demise a year later, gored to death by a bull.
Franklin was born in Marylebone, London, the eldest son of Richard, a surgeon, and his wife, Helen (nee Kimber). He attended Westminster school before national service with the army in the Royal Green Jackets. He subsequently studied history at Christ Church, Oxford, and spent three years working in advertising. The illness and near death of his brother Peter prompted an epiphany and he applied to study at Rada, where he won the Jenny Laird prize for outstanding achievement playing a small part.
After graduation in 1965 Franklin spent a number of years in repertory theatre as an actor and occasional director. In 1973 he was appointed director of East Riding youth theatre in Beverley, Yorkshire and later became associate director of the Grand theatre, Swansea (1976) and the Renaissance theatre, Cumbria (1977). He also directed drama students from Rada, Webber Douglas and Mountview, and was a dogged campaigner for the support and survival of regional theatre.
Aside from Doctor Who, Emmerdale Farm and a 36-episode stint in Crossroads (1969), his TV roles were relatively humble, though he had decent parts in Julian Doyle’s films Chemical Wedding (2008) and Twilight of the Gods (2013, as Richard Wagner), and added the Star Wars franchise to his sci-fi roster with an appearance in the 2016 blockbuster Rogue One.
At heart though, he was a man of the theatre: he was the Narrator in a European tour of The Rocky Horror Show (1990); understudied and occasionally played Arthur Kipps in the long-running West End production of The Woman in Black; was a prolific player of pantomime; and a hard-working producer of his own work at the Edinburgh fringe, writing numerous plays over many years, often with satirical or political intent.
He stood for parliament several times, first as an Independent (Twickenham, 1970), and later as a Liberal Democrat (Sheffield Brightside, 1992). By 1997 he had switched allegiance to the Referendum party (Hackney South and Shoreditch) and in 2001 he represented the UK Independence party in Hove. He later founded the short-lived Silent Majority party and outlined his political ideology in a 2003 book Forest Wisdom: Radical Reform of Democracy and the Welfare State.
A deeply religious man, his faith journey was similarly emblematic of his willingness to explore all options, and he converted from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism late in life.
He spent his last years as a resident of the Charterhouse almshouse in central London, continuing to fulfil Doctor Who-related commitments until he was too ill to do so.
• Richard Kimber Franklin, actor, writer and director, born 15 January 1936; died 25 December 2023
