Michael Bilton
Birthday: Born in 1919-12-14 in Cottingham, East Riding of Yorkshire, England, UK
Deathday: 1993-11-05
TV Credits
Keeping Up Appearances
Character: His Lordship
Hyacinth Bucket (whose name, she insists, is pronounced "Bouquet") is a suburban housewife in the West Midlands. She would be the first to tell you that she is a gracious hostess, a respected citizen, and a well-connected member of high society. If you don't believe that, just ask her best friend Elizabeth, held captive in Hyacinth's kitchen; or the postmen and neighbours who bristle at the sound of her voice; or Richard, her weary and compliant husband. In fact, Hyacinth's reputation could be ...
To the Manor Born
Character: Ned
Sitcom about the love-hate relationship between upper-class Audrey fforbes Hamilton and Richard DeVere, the nouveau rich businessman who buys her manor house when she can no longer afford to keep it....
The Prisoner
Character: M.C. Councillor
After resigning, a secret agent is abducted and taken to what looks like an idyllic village, but is really a bizarre Kafkaesque prison. His warders demand information. He gives them nothing, but only tries to escape....
Waiting for God
Character: Basil Makepeace
Refusing to succumb to old age, Tom Ballard and Diana Trent are a pair of seasoned delinquents that cause many headaches. Their uneasy alliance is destined to make life difficult at the Bayview Retirement Village....
The Bill
Character:
The daily lives of the men and women at Sun Hill Police Station as they fight crime on the streets of London. From bomb threats to armed robbery and drug raids to the routine demands of policing this ground-breaking series focuses as much on crime as it does on the personal lives of its characters....
Doctor Who
Character: Collins
The adventures of The Doctor, a time-traveling humanoid alien known as a Time Lord. He explores the universe in his TARDIS, a sentient time-traveling spaceship. Its exterior appears as a blue British police box, which was a common sight in Britain in 1963 when the series first aired. Along with a succession of companions, The Doctor faces a variety of foes while working to save civilizations, help ordinary people, and right many wrongs....
Z-Cars
Character:
Z-Cars or Z Cars is a British television drama series centred on the work of mobile uniformed police in the fictional town of Newtown, based on Kirkby, Merseyside. Produced by the BBC, it debuted in January 1962 and ran until September 1978....
The Avengers
Character: Dr. Winter
The Avengers is a British television series created in the 1960s. It initially focused on Dr. David Keel and his assistant John Steed. Hendry left after the first series and Steed became the main character, partnered with a succession of assistants. His most famous assistants were intelligent, stylish and assertive women: Cathy Gale, Emma Peel and Tara King. Later episodes increasingly incorporated elements of science fiction and fantasy, parody and British eccentricity....
Crown Court
Character:
Crown Court is an afternoon television courtroom drama produced by Granada Television for the ITV network that ran from 1972, when the Crown Court system replaced Assize courts and Quarter sessions in the legal system of England and Wales, to 1984....
The Saint
Character: Bolande
Simon Templar is The Saint, a handsome, sophisticated, debonair, modern-day Robin Hood who recovers ill-gotten wealth and redistributes it to those in need....
One Foot In the Grave
Character:
One Foot in the Grave is a BBC television sitcom series The series features the exploits of Victor Meldrew and his long-suffering wife, Margaret. The programmes invariably deal with Meldrew's battle against the problems he creates for himself. Living in a typical household in an unnamed English suburb, Victor takes involuntary early retirement. His various efforts to keep himself busy, while encountering various misfortunes and misunderstandings are the themes of the sitcom. The series was larg...
Brideshead Revisited
Character: Hayter
Charles Ryder, an agnostic man, becomes involved with members of the Flytes, a Catholic family of aristocrats, over the course of several years between the two world wars....
The Champions
Character: Dan
The Champions is a British espionage/science fiction/occult detective fiction adventure series consisting of 30 episodes broadcast on the UK network ITV during 1968–1969, produced by Lew Grade's ITC Entertainment production company. The series was broadcast in the US on NBC, starting in summer 1968....
Private Schulz
Character: Hotel Porter
Private Schulz is a BBC television comedy drama serial set mostly in Germany, during and immediately after World War II. It stars Michael Elphick in the title role and Ian Richardson playing various parts. Other notable actors included Tony Caunter, Billie Whitelaw, Billy Murray and Mark Wingett. Over six one-hour episodes, it tells the story of a German fraudster and petty criminal who is forced against his will to serve in the SS. In a story based on the real, though unrealised, plot by the G...
Angels
Character:
Angels is a BBC medical soap-opera which launched on 1st September 1975 and was the blue print for such medical soaps as Casualty, Holby City, plus daytime soap, Doctors. The medical soap focuses on different departments within Heath Green Hospital and was a highly successful continuing drama....
Play for Today
Character:
Play for Today is a British television anthology drama series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC1 from 1970 to 1984. During the run, more than three hundred programmes, featuring original television plays, and adaptations of stage plays and novels, were transmitted. The individual episodes were between fifty and a hundred minutes in duration....
Pennies from Heaven
Character: Dad
Pennies From Heaven is a 1978 BBC television drama serial written by Dennis Potter. The title is taken from a song of the same name written by Johnny Burke and Arthur Johnston. It was one of several Potter serials to mix the reality of the drama with a dark fantasy content, and the earliest of his works where the characters burst into miming to popular 1930s songs....
The Growing Pains of PC Penrose
Character: Man in Police Station
Earnest new recruit PC Penrose has left his home town and joined the force in the Yorkshire town of Slagcaster. He's young and naive but seasoned officer Sergeant Flagg takes him under his wing and shows him the ropes, though his methods can be a little unconventional....
The Three Musketeers
Character:
...
Grace & Favour
Character:
Grace & Favour is a British sitcom sequel to the long-running series Are You Being Served ? It aired on BBC1 for two series from 1992 to 1993 and marked the return of Are You Being Served ? creators and writers Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft....
Doctor Who
Character: Time Lord
The adventures of The Doctor, a time-traveling humanoid alien known as a Time Lord. He explores the universe in his TARDIS, a sentient time-traveling spaceship. Its exterior appears as a blue British police box, which was a common sight in Britain in 1963 when the series first aired. Along with a succession of companions, The Doctor faces a variety of foes while working to save civilizations, help ordinary people, and right many wrongs....
Justice
Character: Councilor Forbes
Justice is a British drama television series which originally aired on ITV in 39 hour-long episodes between 8 August 1971 and 16 October 1974. Margaret Lockwood stars as Harriet Peterson a female barrister in the North of England. It was made by Yorkshire Television and was based loosely on Justice Is a Woman, an episode of ITV Playhouse broadcast in 1969 in which Lockwood had previously also played a barrister. The theme music was Crown Imperial by William Walton....
The Upper Hand
Character: Leo
The Upper Hand is a British television sitcom, produced by Central Independent Television and Columbia Pictures Television and broadcast by ITV from 1990 to 1996. The programme was adapted from the American sitcom Who's the Boss?. As in the former series, an affluent single woman, raising a son with the help of her mother, hires a housekeeper only to have a man apply for the job....
Sherlock Holmes
Character: Stephens
Sherlock Holmes uses his abilities to take on cases by private clients and those that the Scotland Yard are unable to solve, along with his friend Dr. Watson....
Victoria Regina
Character: Footman
Patricia Routledge gives a career-best performance as Queen Victoria in this 1964 series of plays based on the celebrated collection of dramas by playwright Laurence Housman. Self-willed, obstinate, imperious and passionate... a now-familiar description of one of history's longest-serving female monarchs – but Housman's satirical tribute marked a decisive break with the tradition of the uncritical historical portrait. A Broadway hit deemed too disrespectful for public performance in Britain un...
Terry and June
Character: Ernest
Terry and June Medford are both middle aged and beginning to find the trials of life are more difficult as they try to succeed in their daily lives. The couple have just moved to Purley, south-east London... Aunt Lucy and the mynah bird had disappeared, as had the occasionally visiting daughters. Terry and June now mixed with a friendly next door neighbour, Beattie; Terry's chatty work colleague, Malcolm; and their gruff boss Sir Dennis Hodge. Otherwise, things were much as before, with Terry's ...
All Creatures Great and Small
Character: Mr. Hart
All Creatures Great and Small is a British television series, based on the books of the British veterinary surgeon Alf Wight, who wrote under the pseudonym James Herriot. Ninety episodes were aired over two three-year runs. The first run was based directly on Herriot's books; the second was filmed with original scripts....
Coronation Street
Character: Tom Hedley
The residents of Coronation Street are ordinary, working-class people, and the show follows them through regular social and family interactions at home, in the workplace, and in their local pub, the Rovers Return Inn. Britain's longest-running soap....
Movie Credits
Press for Time
Character: Councilor Hedge
Norman is quite happy selling newspapers outside Westminster station but his Grandfather (the Prime Minister) wants to get him "a more responsible job". A few favours are called in and Norman becomes the newest reporter at the seaside town of Tinmouth. After causing chaos at a local council meeting and causing the demolition of a new house he tries to organise a beauty pageant. A slapstick tale of corruption in high and low places...
Silas Marner
Character: Mr. Macey
Adaption of George Eliot's novel. When a respectable weaver is wrongfully accused of theft, he becomes a virtual hermit until his own fortune is stolen and an orphaned child is found on his doorstep....
Full Circle
Character: Salesman
After the death of her daughter, wealthy housewife Julia Lofting abruptly leaves her husband and moves into an old Victorian home in London to re-start her life. All seems well until she is haunted by the sadness of losing her own child and the ghosts of other children....
Frenzy
Character: Trial Jury Foreman (uncredited)
After a serial killer strangles several women with a necktie, London police identify a suspect—but he claims vehemently to be the wrong man....
Funny Farm
Character:
Funny Farm depicts a night shift by nurse Alan Welbeck (Tim Preece) on a psychiatric ward....
Danton's Death
Character: 1st Gentleman
Danton's Death is arguably the most dramatic and penetrating study of revolution ever written. Georg Büchner concentrates on that moment in 1794 when the Reign of Terror, already well established, spills over into a total blood-bath. The play, adapted by director Alan Clarke and Stuart Griffiths, both highly imaginative and closely documentary, shows how the great hero of the early phase of the Revolution, Danton, sickened by the excesses of the guillotine, which he helped to create, wants to ca...
A Taste of Honey
Character: Landlord
While out to avoid spending time with her narcissistic and promiscuous mother, sixteen-year-old Jo has a brief affair that leaves her pregnant and abandoned. When her mother remarries, Jo's only support becomes her friend Geoffrey, a homosexual....
Doctor Who: Pyramids of Mars
Character: Collins
In a Victorian Gothic mansion, strange things are afoot. The master of the house, away in Egypt, has been replaced by a sinister Egyptian. Cloth-wrapped Mummies roam the grounds, killing people. Beneath a pyramid, the last of the Osirans — Sutekh the Destroyer — waits to be freed, to at long last bring his gift of death to all who live....
Arabesque
Character: Microscope Salesman
When a plot against a prominent Middle Eastern politician is uncovered, David Pollock, a professor of ancient hieroglyphics at Oxford University, is recruited to help expose the scheme. Pollock must find information believed to be in hieroglyphic code and must also contend with a mysterious man called Beshraavi. Meanwhile, Beshraavi's lover, Yasmin Azir, seems willing to aid Pollock -- but is she really on his side?...
The Thirty Nine Steps
Character: Vicar
The year is 1914 and Richard Hannay, Mining Engineer who is visiting Britain for a short time before returning to South Africa, is shocked when one of his neighbours, Colonel Scudder, bursts into his rooms one night and tells him a story that Prussian 'sleeper' agents are planning to pre-start World War I by murdering a visiting foreign minister. However, Scudder is murdered and Hannay is framed for the death by the 'sleepers'. Fleeing to Scotland Hannay attempts to clear his name and to stop th...
Doctor Who: The Deadly Assassin
Character: Time Lord
Summoned back to Gallifrey, the Doctor is framed for the assassination of the Time Lord President. To prove his innocence, he must stand for election himself, uncover the traitor in the Time Lord High Council, fight a hooded killer in a nightmare cyberspace world of his enemy's devising and battle against an old foe now out to destroy the Time Lords: The Master....
The Fourth Protocol
Character: Kim Philby
Led by Kim Philby, Plan Aurora is a plan that breaches the top-secret Fourth Protocol and turns the fears that shaped it into a living nightmare. A crack Soviet agent, placed under cover in a quiet English country town, begins to assemble a nuclear bomb, whilst an MI5 agent attempts to prevent its detonation....