The Sunny Side Of Britain's Gloomiest Actor

Geoffrey Palmer is ninety and has been amusing us for more than six decades, on TV, film and stage. Valerie Grove took him to lunch in Highgate.

Geoffrey Palmer is so instantly recognisable, so familiar, that I want to fling my arms around him on sight. He is waiting for me outside Highgate Tube station – he was at the station’s opening, he tells me, in 1941— in a jacket and smart jeans, carrying the Times and a stick, though the stick proves purely decorative. ‘Too geriatric,’ he says, ‘even if it is for The Oldie.’

He turns ninety on 4th June. When people stop him on the Tube and say they admire him, he tells them they must have a long memory. But he has been amusing us for more than six decades, and we shall carry on watching him on box sets for ever. As Time Goes By (67 episodes, 1992–2005) is my favourite.

Judi Dench once told me she could never have done that sitcom without Geoffrey. He tells me he couldn’t have done it without her. The story of their late-flowering love was entirely believable: in their quick glances of mutual affection, and the way they laughed at one other’s jokes. (To see how much they laughed during recordings, click on the out-takes on YouTube. Judi corpses and fluffs her lines; Geoffrey affects exasperation at one point, asking, ‘Is Eileen Atkins free? Maggie Smith, perhaps?’)

He attributes the series’ success to its writer, Bob Larbey, just as he praises the late David Nobbs, creator of Reginald Perrin, in which Palmer played Leonard Rossiter’s Right-wing brother-in-law Jimmy. Palmer and Dench were reunited again in a Bond film: Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), where he played Admiral Roebuck, M’s naval adviser.