David Calder

David Calder:

Super-familiar, classically-trained, all-purpose character actor, perhaps bearing a resemblance to the late Iain Cuthbertson. You might have seen him - in fact it would have been hard to avoid him - in a raft of popular light-middleweight cop and spy dramas over the last four decades. Consider the likes of 'Bergerac', 'Midsomer Murders', 'Dalziel & Pascoe', 'Spooks', 'Heartbeat', 'Boon', 'Widows', 'Widows 2', 'New Tricks', etc, and perhaps better stuff such as 'Cracker', 'Waking The Dead', the oddball sci-fi drama 'Utopia', and the 1981 precursor to the Alan Plater's Beiderbecke trilogy, 'Get Lost', with Alun Armstrong.      

He also had the lead role in the late-'80s sci-fi serial 'Star Cops' which has become a minor cult phenomenon in some corners of the internet, although it failed to catch on with a wider audience. He's never done a 'Doctor Who' though, something of a rarity for these pages.

On the cover of the Radio Times in the guise of Nathan Spring
from the 1987 sci fi series 'Star Cops'  

Other fertile areas include period drama, with appearances in 'Bramwell', 'Mr Selfridge', 'Houdini' (as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), 'The Mayor Of Casterbridge', 'Beethoven', 'Miss Marple', the recent 'Father Brown Mysteries' and commanding the ill fated liner in the 2012 TV mini-series 'Titanic'.   

In 'Hitler: The Rise Of Evil (2003)

As a TV comedy fan, you might have spotted him in the supermarket-set 'Trollied' or in the Greg Davies vehicle 'Cuckoo', or perhaps 'The New Statesman' or 'The Wrong Mans', but that seems like a minor section of his CV.

In 'Waking The Dead: Cold Fusion II'

On the big screen he has some mildly impressive credits, such as 'The World Is Not Enough' (1999), 'Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer' (2006), 'The Lady In The Van' (2015), and the Chinese addition to the Mummy franchise, 'The Mummy: Tomb Of The Emperor' (2008). He's also in the Hunt-Lauda F1 movie 'Rush' (2013). But, despite what imdb seems to claim, I'm pretty sure it's not him in the little-known US gay exploitation flick 'The Meat Rack' (1970)... 

A typical role, tweeded up in 'Midsomer Murders'

By way of consolation, here he is brazenly impersonating a Crime Prevention Officer in a Public Information Film, using an intermittent all-purpose reassuring Northern accent.

David Calder-imdb