David Daker, the character actor who played Harry Crawford in the ITV comedy-drama Boon, has died at the age of 90. His career spanned more than five decades across television, film, and theatre.
Boon and television fame
Daker was best known for his role as Harry Crawford, the entrepreneurial friend of Ken Boon (Michael Elphick) in Boon (1986-1992). The series followed Boon, a former firefighter who styled himself as a modern-day Lone Ranger, riding a motorcycle and taking on odd jobs and private investigations. Daker's character was a less-than-successful businessman running hotels, a ballroom, and a country club. Together they formed CBS (Crawford Boon Security), and the show attracted audiences of up to 15 million over seven series. A final episode aired in 1995.
One notable episode had Boon and Crawford locked in a security vault after interrupting a robbery, reminiscing about their fire service days and the meaning of life. Set in Birmingham and later Nottingham, the programme was also memorable for its theme song, Hi Ho Silver, which became a Top 10 hit for Jim Diamond in 1986.
Early career and Z Cars
Daker's television career took off with a run of more than 80 episodes in the BBC drama Z Cars, playing PC Owen Culshaw (1967-68), though he recalled the character as “a rather colourless person.” He went on to appear in beloved sitcoms such as Only Fools and Horses and Porridge, as well as Coronation Street and Doctor Who.
The youngest of five children, David was born in Bilston, in the Black Country, to Olive (nee Cutler) and Elijah Daker, a shoe factory worker. He showed his performing talents at infant school. “I clearly remember playing a cow and falling so that its legs splayed about – and enjoying it when the others laughed and applauded,” he recalled. At age 13, at Etheridge (now Moseley Park) secondary school, he played Long John Silver in Treasure Island.
His parents wanted him to find a steady job, so he trained as a draughtsman with a firm making water softeners, but walked out after two years. “I simply came home one day and announced that I was finished with a nine-to-five job,” Daker said.
Theatre and stage work
Weeks later, he joined the Oxford Playhouse Theatre School, then did national service in the RAF, and gained experience with Oldham Rep as a stage manager, actor, and director (1957-60). During a long stint at Salisbury Playhouse (1960-65), first as a director then actor, he starred as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1964).
He moved on to the Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham (1965), the Everyman, Cheltenham (1965-67), and the Castle, Farnham (1970), then made his London debut as Hephaestus in Prometheus Bound at the Mermaid Theatre (1971). An audition with director Lindsay Anderson led to roles at the Royal Court (1971-72) before Daker appeared with the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre as Shokhin in The Zykovs, Chuck in The Iceman Cometh (both 1976), and Reg Drummond in Privates on Parade (1977).
He returned to the West End in Saint Joan at the Strand (now Novello) Theatre in 1994, with Imogen Stubbs in the title role. “As Warwick’s testy chaplain, De Stogumber, David Daker for once makes the real voice of Bernard Shaw heard,” wrote David Murray in the Financial Times. “A plain, thick Englishman, he fulminates and blusters vengefully, but when the chips go down he is overcome with simple horror.”
Television roles across genres
On TV he took endless roles in both dramas and comedies. After Z Cars, his RAF experience was handy for the part of one of the national service conscripts in a 1975 TV version of Arnold Wesker's Chips With Everything. Then he played the brutal miner husband in The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1976), from a DH Lawrence story, and the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess in Holocaust (1978).
In the adventure series Dick Turpin (1979-82), starring Richard O'Sullivan, Daker played the highwayman's former army nemesis, Captain Nathan Spiker. He followed this with Only Fools and Horses, in which in 1982 he played Tommy Mackay, the violent estranged husband of a woman dating Rodney (Nicholas Lyndhurst), and gets into a fight with Del Boy (David Jason) when he mistakes him for his cheating wife's lover. Earlier, Daker was involved in a brawl with another fondly remembered sitcom character, Godber (Richard Beckinsale), in a 1977 episode of Porridge.
He had two roles in Coronation Street, as Basil Griffin (1968-69), whose wife leaves him for an uninterested Len Fairclough, and Gordon Lewis, an unpopular relief manager at the Rovers Return three times between 1981 and 1985. He also appeared twice in Doctor Who, as the 13th-century robber baron Irongron in The Time Warrior (1973-74) and the spacecraft commanding officer Rigg in Nightmare of Eden (1979).
Demonstrating his range, he played classical roles in the BBC's Shakespeare productions of King Henry VI and Richard III (both 1983), as well as Brother Benjamin in the second series of the Salvation Army sitcom Hallelujah! (1984), alongside Thora Hird. Later, he starred in the BBC drama Crown Prosecutor (1995) as Ben Campbell, one of the lawyers handling criminal cases for the Crown Prosecution Service.
Film and personal life
In films, he played the father of the boy on a voyage through time and space in Time Bandits (1981) and the police desk sergeant in I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle (1990), with Elphick as his boss.
In 1957, Daker married Stella Newton; they later divorced. They had a son, Tim, and a daughter, Pippa, who had multiple sclerosis and died in 1997. The following year Daker was found guilty of assault over a parking dispute, but, accepting he was under stress, magistrates gave him a conditional discharge. He is survived by his second wife, Hilary (nee Voisey), their daughter, Rebecca, his son, Tim, and a sister, Hazel.
Colin David Daker, actor, born 29 September 1935; died 30 April 2026.
