Keith Barron, who has died aged 83, was once described as “that utility halfback among TV actors”. He deftly switched from drama to comedy and found his greatest fame as David Pearce, the Casanova husband in Yorkshire Television’s Duty Free (1984-86). Gwen Taylor played his wife, Amy, while Neil Stacy and Joanna Van Gyseghem took the roles of Robert and Linda Cochran in the sitcom about two couples on a package holiday in Marbella. There was hiding-in-the-wardrobe farcical humour when David and Linda had an affair, and, although many TV critics labelled it tacky, the programme attracted some 17 million viewers.
Barron sometimes rued that this was the role for which he was best known, having originally made his mark on screen in heavier fare. He was the title character in Stand Up, Nigel Barton and Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, Dennis Potter’s early, semi-autobiographical 1965 dramas in the Wednesday Play strand.
In those, he played a miner’s son who breaks through the class barriers to study at Oxford University, becomes a journalist and hits the hustings as a Labour candidate in a byelection. Barron brought the appropriate “angry” quality to his performance as the idealistic young man who becomes disillusioned with the “charade” of politics and eventually, in a seven-minute speech, tells the audience at a civic event that all three parties have “dead ideas, dead thoughts, dead slogans” and that campaigning is a “humiliating experience”.
But Duty Free defined Barron’s career and brought further starring roles in sitcoms of the 1980s and 90s. In Room at the Bottom (1986-88), he played Kevin Hughes, the tyrannical owner of Megla Television who sacks Nesbitt Gunn (James Bolam) as drama producer, moves him to the quiz department and continues to hound him.
Barron was in period costume to play the 18th-century drinking and womanising rogue of the title in Haggard (1990-92), a bawdy comedy written by Duty Free’s creator Eric Chappell and based on Michael Green’s Daily Telegraph column Squire Haggard’s Journal. He also starred as Guy Lofthouse, paired with Nigel Havers as Guy McFadyean, in The Good Guys (1992-93), about a pair of amateur sleuths who stumble into solving crimes. The comedy-drama was devised by the theatrical agent and producer Michael Whitehall, father of the actor Jack, who appeared in it as a three-year-old.
Barron was born in Mexborough, in the West Riding of Yorkshire (now South Yorkshire), to Zillah (nee Rothery) and Alexander, a wholesale provisions supplier. On leaving Mexborough Technical College, he went into the family business but had ambitions to act that were fuelled by childhood visits to local music halls. He gained experience with Mexborough theatre guild’s amateur dramatics company alongside a future fellow thespian, Brian Blessed.
After national service in the RAF, Barron joined the repertory company at Sheffield Playhouse, making his debut as the porter in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. While there, he met the stage designer Mary Pickard, whom he married in 1959.
He made his first impression on television as the easy-going Detective Sergeant John Swift in The Odd Man, for its last three series (1962-65), and for the first run (1964-65) of the policing spin-off It’s Dark Outside.
His first sitcom success came with the starring role of a university graduate from Yorkshire making sense of swinging London in The Further Adventures of Lucky Jim (1967), Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais’ update of the character from Kingsley Amis’s 1954 novel. He also played Derek in No Strings (1974), Carla Lane’s sitcom about the relationship that develops when a bachelor shares his flat with a female lodger (Rita Tushingham). Then he was Daniel Ford, opposite Susan Hampshire in Leaving, Lane’s 1984-85 series about a couple struggling with divorce.
Barron was cast as a sex symbol in some of his best roles: as the theatre director Tim Hart, threatening the marriage of Peter Barkworth’s banker, in Telford’s Change (1979), as Nanette Newman’s lover in a 1981 adaptation of John Braine’s novel Stay With Me Till Morning, and as Tom, the taxi driver who has an affair with Maggie O’Neill’s lonely woman settling into a Midlands industrial town, in Tony Marchant’s Take Me Home (1989).
Later in his career, he was upgraded to father, his screen sons including Robson Green in the thriller Take Me (2001) and Stephen Tomkinson in the second series of DCI Banks (2012-15). As Ted Jackson he became a father after 23 years of marriage in Late Expectations (1987), and in further sitcom roles he owned a bakery in All Night Long (1994), and a local newspaper in Dead Man Weds (2005).
Barron was the Whig politician Charles James Fox in the serial Prince Regent (1979), with Peter Egan in the title role, played Alan Boothe (2003-04) in the feelgood drama Where the Heart Is, and was George Williams in Kay Mellor’s veterinary drama The Chase (2006-07). A stage version of Duty Free ran in Bournemouth in 1985, but a nationwide 2014 revival show foundered.
He gave what one reviewer described as “a masterclass of understated menace” as Captain Striker in the 1983 Doctor Who story Enlightenment, and in 2007 was George Trench, one of Angela Hawthorne’s three ex-husbands in Coronation Street. Between 1999 and 2008, he appeared in Countdown’s Dictionary Corner dozens of times, and his voice was heard in many public information films and commercials.
For three years from 1980, Barron and his wife ran a successful restaurant in Hayle, Cornwall.
Mary survives him, as does their son, Jamie, who is also an actor.
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