David Graham, actor who voiced Parker and Brains in Thunderbirds and the Daleks in Doctor Who

He based the voice of Lady Penelope’s butler-chauffeur on that of a wine waiter at a pub in Cookham who claimed to have served the Queen

David Graham, who has died age 99, gave voice to the endearing butler-chauffeur Aloysius “Nosey” Parker in Thunderbirds, the terrifying Daleks of Doctor Who and the adorable Grandpa Pig in Peppa Pig; he also appeared at the National Theatre with Laurence Olivier and in television series ranging from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1956 to The Bill and Casualty almost half a century later.
Graham, a somewhat lugubrious and skeletal figure, had been working on a television series with Gerry Anderson when the director confided he was considering making puppet films. “I said ‘I’m pretty good at accents’, so he said, ‘Let me have your number’,” Graham recalled.
He was heard in several of Anderson’s programmes, including the puppet Western Four Feather Falls (1960) with Nicholas Parsons as well as Supercar, Fireball XL5 and Stingray, before Thunderbirds came up. Anderson suggested he listen to the distinctive voice of Arthur, a wine waiter at a pub in Cookham, who claimed to have served Queen Elizabeth II.
“The wine waiter came over and he said, ‘Would you like to see the wine list, sir? We’ve got all sorts of wine, we’ve got beaujolais, champagne and merlot’ – and that was the birth of Parker,” Graham told the Tracy Island Chronicles.
When Lady Penelope (voiced by Sylvia Anderson) rang the bell in the first episode, Parker came in and said: “You called, m’lady?” But that did not sound quite right. “So we made it, ‘You rang, m’lady?’ and that was it,” Graham added. He appeared in two series of Thunderbirds, also voicing the serious-minded Brains to whom he gave a mild speech impediment because “sometimes the ideas come out so fast that they stutter a bit”.
Graham was doing other voiceover work when Peter Hawkins, of Flower Pot Men fame, invited him to create the voice of the Daleks for Doctor Who. “We adopted this staccato style, then they fed it through a synthesiser to make it more sinister,” he said. 
He voiced the xenophobic mutants in all four of their appearances during William Hartnell’s era as well as in two feature films, Dr Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150AD (1966). He was also the grating voice of the Mechanoids in The Chase (1965) and appeared on screen as Charlie, bartender of the Last Chance Saloon, in The Gunfighters.
His final appearance on Doctor Who was alongside Tom Baker’s Doctor in the 1979 story “City of Death”, playing Professor Fyodor Nikolai Kerensky, a scientist working on time experiments who is aged to death by the story’s villain Scaroth.
A new generation of viewers heard Graham’s voice as the grandfather of Peppa and George in the preschool series Peppa Pig. He was also the voice of the wise old elf in Ben and Holly’s Little Kingdom (2009-13).
The key, he said, was to take voice work just as seriously as any stage or television role. Every episode had to be played with total conviction and reality, no matter how silly: “One of the great things about Thunderbirds is that all the characters are so rounded and believable. And if you don’t play them with total commitment, people won’t believe you.”
David Michael Graham was born “with the acting gene raging inside me” in Hackney, East London, on July 11 1925, the son of a life insurance salesman. He was raised in a Jewish Orthodox household, “so I had a big battle, and it was difficult to wrench myself out, but I finally did and I became an actor”.
During the war he served as a radar mechanic in 99 Squad­­ron RAF, servicing airborne radar on Halifax bombers, but always insisted that he could never solder two wires together. An uncle had run away to join the theatre and emigrated to the US, while his sister married a GI and headed there. Hating his postwar office job, Graham followed them to New York, training with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse.
To avoid acquiring an American accent he returned to Britain, working in repertory theatre. He appeared at the Nottingham Playhouse in Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui directed by Michael Blakemore with Leonard Rossiter, which “was like working with a human dynamo”. The play transferred to the West End, where it ran for six months at the Shaftesbury Theatre.
Olivier spotted him there and cast him as a flashy gangster in The Front Page (1972), again directed by Blakemore, which toured to Australia. He then used an Italian accent to appear with Olivier in Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall’s adaptation of Eduardo de Filippo’s dramatic comedy Saturday, Sunday, Monday (1973-74) directed by Franco Zeffirelli. During the show the actors eat a real meal on stage, but one occasion the meat was off. “Much mirth ensued and the great man [Olivier] read us a lecture the following day,” he said.
He was Big Brother in “1984”, Ridley Scott’s advert for Steve Jobs’s new Apple Macintosh computers, and Einstein for BBC Two’s Horizon in 2005 “They could have gone for anybody, any big name, and they chose me,” he said with a smile. He also toured as the composer Edward Elgar in Justin Pearson’s half-play, half-concert Stirring the Spirit and was an elderly loner with only a dog and magpie for company in the unsettling short film One for Sorrow (2011).
Nine years ago Graham returned to play Parker in Thunderbirds Are Go!, a 50th-anniversary reboot with Rosamund Pike as Lady Penelope. Last year he reprised the Daleks for a colourised version of the original story. He had no regrets about being out of the limelight, telling the Daily Mirror: “If it happens people notice you, that’s great – but I don’t do it for that. I love the work.”
David Graham, born July 11 1925, died September 20 2024