Bill Waddington

Few people are able to start, two years after the usual retirement age, a new career which makes them better known than anything they did in their past lives. But Bill Waddington, who has died in hospital after suffering from Parkinson's disease, aged 84, the entertainer who played Percy Sugden, the officious yet good-natured functionary always eluding Phyllis Pearce's blue-rinsed blandishments in Granada TV's long-running soap Coronation Street, was one of the fortunate few.

He was 67, living alone and disconsolate after the death of his wife Lilian had ended 32 years of conspicuously happy marriage, when, in 1983, he received the telephone call that revived his professional life. Waddington had first met his wife when, as Lilian Day, she was a regular principal boy in pantomime. After her death, he still talked aloud to her, in their modest home near Manchester, in the hope of getting some fresh pattern and meaning to his life.

That call from Granada wanted to know whether, after a lifetime spent amiably as a comedian (beginning in the second world war), he would play the irascible, unpredictable new community centre caretaker Percy Sugden, conceived of as a former Desert Rat with a flat cap and a pencil moustache.

Waddington himself was far from sure, but was determined to give it a try. He asked to see some scripts. In the end, he found that as long as he played the character dead straight, he could give Sugden humour, just as self-important but well-intentioned people in real life can easily appear funny.

Waddington was born in the middle of the first world war - and almost in the middle of the lunchtime drinks his mother was serving in the pub his father was managing for a friend, the Clarence Hotel in Oldham. She went upstairs to have her son, rather to the irritation of his over-worked father, a pliant carpenter who had first turned butcher to work in his ambitious wife's butchery business, and had then agreed to stand in as pub landlord for a friend who had joined up in the war. Waddington always thought he got his easy humour from his father, his will to hold people's attention from his forceful mother.

Expelled from his first school for being unruly, and at the age of ten expelled from Oldham parish church choir for pinching two bananas from the harvest festival display, he went to grammar school, but left at 14 after being described as "the clown for the class".

He had already done his first comic writing - a poem written after his boyhood crush, Gladys, suddenly got her long hair cut, revealing a dirty neck: "Oh Gladys, your neck/ Is a dirty old wreck/ And something is wanted to clean it./ Pan shine and soap/ May be a hope/ But emery's the stuff and you need it."

His flair for comedy was turned to more practical and chivalrous account when serving in his mother's butchery shop, increasing its turnover. When his mother, possibly enjoying another strong personality better from a distance, suggested he branch out for himself, he got a job selling medical equipment, which was overtaken by the second world war.

An admirer of the comedian George Formby, Waddington had mastered the ukelele and became an entertainer in the army's Blue Pencils concert party. He wrote his own comedy routines. These were well received by the radio critics when the BBC broadcast excerpts. Soon he was billed as "the Army's Top Comic".

As a postwar civilian comedian he was for 20 years, on a simple handshake, under the wing of the agents and impresarios Lew and Leslie Grade. He appeared with top calibre artists like Lena Horne and Frankie Laine, did a Royal Variety Performance, ran a Rolls Royce, bought a farm, failed as a pig rearer but succeeded as a breeder of racehorses at the stud he owned in Shropshire.

Racehorses remained a passion even after the traumatic death of his wife Lilian in 1980, when he found himself talking to a pile of manure: "I'll be back to clean you up in a minute," he said. That lapse into sanitary conversation told him that he badly needed a new interest.

Coronation Street and its off-screen social life supplied it. He was even thrilled when Percy Sugden's grumpiness won him the title, through a tabloid newspaper poll, of the third most hated person on TV, after JR of Dallas and Alexis of Dynasty. His character left the Street to move to a care home in 1997 after Waddington reportedly objected to the soap's ever-more racy storylines.

He married four times - once, briefly, during the war, then long and successfully to Lilian, by whom he had two daughters, Anne and Barbara. After Lilian's death in 1982 he married Irene, again briefly, and then, in 1995, Sheila, who survives him. A documentary innovator, his work explored the joys and fears of people who had previously been overlooked by television