Michael Angelis obituary

The actor Michael Angelis, who has died of a heart attack aged 76, had already enjoyed some fame in sitcom before he brought heartbreak and pathos to the powerful 1980s television drama Boys from the Blackstuff, where comedy – borne out of resilience – was overshadowed by tragedy. He played Chrissie, one of five Liverpudlian former tarmac layers struggling for survival as their city faces depression in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies.

The hard-hitting series put the Liverpool writer Alan Bleasdale firmly on the map after he previously featured the characters in his 1980 TV play The Black Stuff. It began with Angelis literally in the driving seat as Chrissie and his friends – accompanied by his pet goose – set off in a van for work in Middlesbrough. At the time, there were fewer than one million unemployed, but Bleasdale foresaw what was happening in the country.

As the figure headed towards three million and more, he wrote Boys from the Blackstuff, broadcast in 1982, as five plays observing the experiences of each character. While Bernard Hill, as Yosser Hughes, made “Gizza job!” a catchphrase for many of those out of work as the drama burned into the national psyche, Chrissie was seen as the most down-to-earth of the gang, but demonstrated how his dignity was being destroyed as he struggled to put food on the family table.

In an intensely raw scene at the end of his story, when he has his gas cut off and finds himself being investigated by department of employment officials, there appears to be a truce in the rows he has with his wife (played by Julie Walters) as he tells her: “Angie, this is our life – and I wish I was dead… I had a job, Angie. It wasn’t a bad job and I was good at it. I laid the roads – motorways, lay-bys, country lanes. But I lost that job.”

After reflecting on 11 years of marriage, Angie finds her anger overspills as she remonstrates: “I’ve had enough of that ‘if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry’. Why don’t you cry? Why don’t you scream? Why don’t you fight back, you bastards? Fight back!” Chrissie cracks, walks outside and slaughters his geese, with the blood spraying over their pet rabbit. “We’d better wash the blood off that rabbit,” he tells Angie as the couple embrace in painful resignation.

To a younger generation, Angelis’s distinctive lyrical voice was heard as the narrator of 14 series (from 1992 to 2012) of the popular animation Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends (later retitled Thomas & Friends) after taking over from the former Beatles drummer and fellow Liverpudlian Ringo Starr.  The series was launched in 1984 by the producer Britt Allcroft, who saw the potential in turning the Rev Wilbert Awdry’s Railway Series of books, and those of his son Christopher, into a children’s TV programme. She felt that young viewers should hear a single voice, the narrator, to give an impression of the books being read to them (although later on other actors were involved) and hired Starr.

Although the programmes finished after two series, they were revived in 1992 and Angelis started his run as the longest-running narrator of the animated production with a story about Percy and Henry arguing over scarves. He continued until Mark Moraghan took over in 2013.

Michael was born in London to Margaret (nee McCulla) and Evangelos Angelis, a Greek immigrant, and brought up in the Dingle area of Liverpool. He trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Glasgow, and acted with repertory theatre companies in England and Scotland, notably the Liverpool Everyman.

His first significant television role came in the writer Carla Lane’s flatmates sitcom The Liver Birds, set in the city. When, for the fifth series in 1975, Sandra, played by Nerys Hughes, was joined by Elizabeth Estensen as the loud and gaudy Carol, Angelis played her brother, Lucien, an obsessive rabbit lover. “It’s me rabbits!” even became a popular catchphrase in school playgrounds.

The sitcom finished in 1979 but, for a short-lived revival in 1996, he returned as Lucien – who was then the brother of Beryl (Polly James), brought back with Hughes to reunite the comedy’s most popular female duo, who had appeared together from 1971 to 1974.

Angelis appeared in two other Lane sitcoms, I Woke Up One Morning (1985-86) as Max, one of four recovering alcoholics undergoing psychotherapy in a hospital ward, and Luv (1993-94), starring as Harold Craven, a working-class millionaire who finds that money is not everything as he showers it on his wife (Sue Johnston) and their three adopted children.

He also continued to work with Bleasdale, who regarded his performances as “real” and “truthful”. He starred in the 1985 film No Surrender as the new manager of a Liverpool club whose previous boss had maliciously booked a forthcoming event for two groups of senior citizens – one Catholic, one Protestant. On television, Angelis played Martin Niarchos, the poet friend of Michael Palin’s teacher, in the political drama GBH (1991) and a detective in Melissa (1997), the writer’s reworking of a Francis Durbridge TV murder-mystery.

His other small-screen roles included the club owner Irwin in the revenge killing mini-series The Marksman (1987); Merlin in the children’s fantasy Wail of the Banshee (1992); Arnie, alongside Russ Abbot in his first straight acting role, in September Song (1993-95); and Mickey Startup, a Liverpool club owner and criminal involved in human trafficking and sex slavery, in the first run of another revived sitcom, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, in 2002.

The actor switched effortlessly between drama and comedy, and appeared in many programmes not set in Liverpool, but he returned to the city of his childhood for Good Cop (2012) to play Robert Rocksavage, the bed-ridden father of Warren Brown’s title character seeking revenge on the murderers of a police colleague.

On the West End stage, Angelis acted one of the working-class social climbers in the Liverpool playwright Willy Russell’s comedy One for the Road (Lyric theatre, 1987).

His first marriage, in 1991, to the Coronation Street actor Helen Worth, ended in divorce 10 years later. He is survived by his second wife, Jennifar Khalastchi (nee Thomas), whom he married in 2003. His elder brother, Paul, also an actor, died in 2009.

• Nicolas Michael Angelis, actor, born 29 April 1944; died 30 May 2020