Bill Stewart

British television in the 1980s and 90s ran on actors like Stewart. Liverpool-born, he had the sort of face that lets a director establish a scene without dialogue, and he handed that face to Z-Cars, Bordertown, G.B.H. and A Touch of Frost, where as the Denton Evening News reporter Sandy Longford he became the recurring character most viewers could name him by.

The stand-out is smaller and better. In Edge of Darkness he plays Dingle, the Metropolitan Police liaison who is helpful in the way that means he is reporting to somebody else, and the part sits exactly where the serial's paranoia needs it. He could do comedy too, arriving as Terry Norton in Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge without ever signalling that he knew it was a joke.

The films were mostly a day here and there inside someone else's production: an arresting officer in 101 Dalmatians, Mycroft Kincaid in Anna and the King, a coachman in Black Beauty, Ginge in the comedy Pirates, a chess compere in FairyTale: A True Story, Bullneck in the football drama When Saturday Comes. His last credit, Rudy in Copying Beethoven, reached cinemas in the year he died. It is a career with no headline in it and a great deal of use.