Basil Moss obituary

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Stalwart actor best known for his roles in TV’s Compact and the radio soap Waggoners’ Walk

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Anthony Hayward

Mon 28 Dec 2020 17.57 GMT

Last modified on Mon 28 Dec 2020 18.58 GMT

 

Basil Moss, who has died aged 85, was a perennial character actor often

popping up in popular series as authority figures, but he found his best parts in two BBC soaps.

 

He became a familiar face on television as the librarian Alan Drew in Compact, set in the offices of a glossy women’s magazine. The role made him a heart-throb as his character went through various melodramas in and out of the reference library, including a string of relationships, from the time he arrived in 1963 – a year after Compact began – until his departure shortly before its demise, in mid-1965.

 

Moss was even launched on a brief pop singing career under his screen name, co-writing four singles with Hazel Adair and Peter Ling, who devised the serial. Always the Lonely One was a minor hit, peaking at No 48 in 1964.

 

His later soap role, in Waggoners’ Walk, as Peter Tyson, a personnel officer at Abercrombies, a fictional central London department store, was on radio. He was ever-present in the hugely popular serial, which ran for 11 years (1969-80). This saga of London’s Hampstead set kept the swinging 60s going into the new decade. It moved away from the cosy world of The Dales, which it replaced, to deal with previously taboo subjects such as homosexuality, illegitimacy and abortion.

When Peter Tyson’s marriage to Lynn (Judy Franklin) broke up, he was given custody of their son Jeremy. He remarried, to a newspaper journalist, Liz Warner (Ann Morrish), and had three daughters with her, including twins. He left his job after being implicated in fraudulent dealings and later, as the sun set on Waggoners’ Walk, bought shares in a boatyard.

The soap was axed by the BBC as a cost-cutting measure, despite being more popular than The Archers, which survived because of its standing as a radio institution. More than 1,000 fans wrote in protest, but to no avail.

Moss spent the rest of his career taking mostly one-off roles on television and acting in radio plays, but he dedicated increasing time to activities related to his old school, St Paul’s, in Barnes, south-west London. He was a member of the Old Pauline Club and a leader of the Pauline Meetings, a group attached to the school’s Christian Union.

In 1977, he was founding managing director of Thames Ditton Sports and Squash Club (since renamed Colets Health and Fitness), ensuring the long-term future of the Old Paulines’ sports pitches and rugby, football and cricket teams.

Basil was born in London to Martha (nee Keating) and Basil Moss. His father was an actor who died two weeks after his son’s birth when he was in a car crash on his way home after reputedly collecting a Hollywood contract.

Following national service in the North Staffordshire regiment and the Marines, Moss trained at Rada (1956-58), then acted in repertory theatre. His screen career began with the regular role of John Mundy, a junior newspaper reporter, in the TV series Deadline Midnight (1960-61). He had two short runs as a patient in 1961 and 1962 in the hospital serial Emergency – Ward 10, through which he came to the attention of Adair, one of its scriptwriters.

After Compact, Moss’s other TV roles included Ham Peggotty in a 1966 serialisation of David Copperfield; Martin Hepworth, one of Ken Barlow’s intellectual friends, for four 1968 episodes of Coronation Street; a doctor with the hi-tech military agency Shado, defending the Earth against aliens, in UFO (1970-71), the puppet master Gerry Anderson’s first full live-action series; and Robert Atkinson in the political thriller series First Among Equals (1986).

With a lifelong love of music, he was perfectly cast as the choirmaster Ralph Burton in A Sort of Innocence (1987), a six-part drama about a young Hereford cathedral chorister. He had played the piano as a child and later took up the trumpet, forming his own jazz band, Basil Moss and His Chicago Jazzmen, which continued performing until 2014.

Uncredited, Moss was also seen as a Navy submarine officer in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967).

He is survived by his twin sister, Sheila.

• Basil David Moss, actor, born 25 May 1935; died 28 November 2020