PETER BARKWORTH was more like the bank manager he made famous in the TV serial Telford’s Change in the 1970s than an actor. He was fastidious, gentle-mannered, selfeffacing even. His pleasant round face was almost always in repose. His thoughtful demeanour seemed ever to be pondering the wisdom of extending someone’s overdraft.

Yet his consummate skill in eliminating the stuffed shirt persona from a series of urban, middle-class gentlemen confronted with extraordinary situations, made him at this peak a favourite of millions of viewers — particularly of women who wrote him a steady flow of, often intimate, fan letters seeking or offering comfort and advice.

From the early 1960s he established himself as that rarity, an actor who could make blandness intriguing and watchable. He was able to hint subtly at strong emotional tensions beneath the well-cut tweeds and pinstripes.

So familiar did he become as the rising international banker who decides to forgo ambition and manage a small-town branch, that it is easy to forget that Telford’s Change ran for only ten weeks in 1978; although it was repeated to appease popular demand.

Every Sunday during its initial run more than seven million viewers sat absorbed as he tried to cope with shaky clients and an even shakier onscreen marriage to his co-star Hannah Gordon. Brian Clark (author of the stage play Whose Life Is It Anyway?), who wrote Telford’s Change, once referred to Barkworth as having the “most flawless technique of any actor on television”.

Throughout his most fruitful decades — the late 1950s through to the 1980s — he became one of the small screen’s busiest actors, starring in a wide variety of productions from the title role in the BBC’s Czar Nicholas II, to playing the sleuth in Francis Durbridge’s The Passenger.

When not before the cameras he was on stage, where he frequently earned critical approval. In one memorable West End success early in his career he played Bernard Taggart-Stewart in Roar Like a Dove at the Phoenix Theatre (1957). It ran for more than 1,000 performances. Fifteen years later he was celebrated for his uncannily accurate portrayal of Edward VIII in Crown Matrimonial at the Haymarket, a role he was to repeat on television.

No less an admirer of his controlled stage technique was Sir John Gielgud, who once remarked after seeing Barkworth as Carless in a production of The School for Scandal: “Peter, the way you play it, the part should be called Careful.”

For a lifelong bachelor, Barkworth seemed fascinated by marital strife. In 1985 he created in quick succession two more of his many memorable angst-filled, middle-class characters beset by spouse problems. Both in series which — like Telford — were based on original ideas of his own.

In The Price (also written by Clark) he played a computer tycoon forced to put his business at risk to pay a ransom for his kidnapped wife. In Late Starter he was a newly retired academic who discovers that his wife has gambled away all his life savings, leaving him heavily in debt. The closest he had ever come to marriage, he would say, was in his twenties and involved two separate relationships. In one he left the girl, in the other the girl left him.

Peter Wynn Barkworth was born in 1929 in Margate, but grew up in Bramhall, Cheshire. His sales director father, Walter Wynn Barkworth, was transferred to the area in the Second World War.

It was at Stockport School that from the age of 11 he became interested in the stage, encouraged by the enthusiasm of one of the many women teachers replacing male colleagues called up for war service. She masterminded productions of one-act plays.

At 16 Barkworth had it firmly in mind that he wanted to become a stand-up comic. He discovered the thrill of making an audience laugh while acting out funny sketches at fundraising concerts billed as the “Boy Entertainer”. He decided, though, on a dramatic career after playing Macbeth in a school production in spite of illness reducing his voice to a whisper on the last night.