The actor Tom Georgeson, who has died aged 89, starred in two groundbreaking TV drama series as characters on both sides of the law, playing a social security cheat in Boys from the Blackstuff and a police officer rooting out force corruption in Between the Lines.
When Alan Bleasdale wrote his original, single BBC play The Black Stuff (1980), Georgeson, a firm socialist, played Tommy Dean – nicknamed “Dixie” after the legendary Everton footballer – the foreman of a group of Liverpol tarmac layers working in Middlesbrough.
“He always looked like a foreman, a bit harassed,” said Bleasdale, who recalled him as “the first proper actor in my life I ever spoke to”. Georgeson, himself a Liverpool fan, had been cast in the writer’s first stage play, Fat Harold and the Last 26, at the city’s Playhouse in 1975.
Dixie Dean returned in 1982 for Bleasdale’s five-part series Boys from the Blackstuff, with each episode focusing on one of the gang, all by then struggling to find work. An early scene features Dixie in an unemployment benefit office being asked how many dependants he is claiming for. When told his two grownup children on the dole “don’t count”, he replies: “Nobody on the dole counts, friend.”
In Moonlighter, the episode homing in on the miseries experienced by Georgeson’s character, Dixie takes a job as a security guard while claiming dole money and is strong-armed into turning a blind eye as goods are stolen from a docked ship. “You are shite, you’re nothing, you’re the dregs, dragged here off the dole,” a thieving docks worker played by Tony Haygarth tells him. “So you just stand there and do what you’re supposed to do – watch us ‘work’.”
While Yosser Hughes (played by Bernard Hill) captured the imagination of the British public with his catchphrase “Gizza job” at a time when unemployment was soaring beyond 3 million under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, Boys from the Blackstuff was described by Radio Times as “farce, tragedy and tussles with the DoE”.
Later, in Between the Lines (1992-94), Georgeson, a native Liverpudlian, played Detective Inspector Harry Naylor, the cockney sidekick to Detective Superintendent Tony Clark (Neil Pearson) in the Metropolitan Police’s fictional Complaints Investigation Bureau.
The gruff, chain-smoking officer is initially seen as principled, but in the second series becomes more pragmatic, willing to bend the rules. He is also revealed to be a keen ballroom dancer – Georgeson’s own idea, letting viewers “see behind the façade to the private man”, he said.
For the third and final series, Clark, Naylor and Detective Superintendent “Mo” Connell (Siobhan Redmond) leave the police to work in private security and Naylor grieves the death of his wife.
Tom was the fourth of 11 children born in Liverpool to Mary (nee Parker) and Herbert Georgeson, a department store sales manager who performed in amateur dramatics.
As a child, he aimed to follow two of his brothers into training for the priesthood and moved from a Liverpool secondary school to a Catholic boarding school in Wales. Spending 18 months in a seminary in Valladolid, Spain, from the age of 17 changed his mind.
He did national service as a radio direction finder in the RAF, started his working life as an assistant in the Liverpool tailor’s shop Jackson, then accompanied a sister to Australia, where he taught in a primary school and acted with the Adelaide branch of the Therry Society, an amateur dramatics company. In 1962 he married Primrose Newby, an actor and ballet dancer.
Three years later they left for Britain, where Georgeson’s experience in classical plays in Australia earned him small roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon and at the Aldwych theatre in London (1966-68). He then had a stint with Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre company at the Old Vic (1969-72).
By then, he was beginning his prolific career as a character actor on television. In Coronation Street, he made a handful of appearances as a sleazy press photo-journalist between 1974 and 1976.
After Boys from the Blackstuff, Georgeson worked with Bleasdale again on two other TV series, in Scully as Isiah, the scar-faced police sergeant determined to bring the teenage scallywag and his gang to book (1984), and in GBH (1991) as Lou Barnes, a Militant tendency activist of whom there are hints of being an MI5 agent under cover.
No Surrender (1985), a black comedy by Bleasdale (his only feature film), featured Georgeson as the owner of a Liverpool hall whose sacked manager has maliciously double-booked rival groups of Catholic and Protestant pensioners.
Later, he played Eddie Johnson, a chauvinist football coach, in The Manageress (1989-90), starring Cherie Lunghi as the boss of a men’s struggling team; Ryan Blaney, the widowed father and murder suspect, in the PD James story Devices and Desires (1991); Detective Inspector Howard Jones, in charge of the vice squad, in the police drama Liverpool 1 (1998-99); the thief Bardolph, providing comic relief in the BBC series The Hollow Crown (2012), adaptations of Shakespeare’s history plays; and the lawyer’s clerk Clamb, a character created by Andrew Davies for his adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel Bleak House (2005). He also had two roles in Doctor Who (1975 and 1981).
In other films, Georgeson made an impression as George Thomason (a play on his own name), leading the gang carrying out a heist, in the comedy A Fish Called Wanda (1988), and he played the deputy headteacher in Notes on a Scandal (2006).
At the age of 80, he returned to the RSC to play Leon, the “Old Labour” docker, retired and terminally ill, in The Seven Acts of Mercy, Anders Lustgarten’s drama interweaving the baroque world of Caravaggio with contemporary Merseyside, performed at the Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in 2016. The Financial Times described him as “a giant of an actor for whom impassioned-even-on-his-deathbed is no challenge”.
He is survived by Primrose, their daughter, Rosalind, and son, Richard, five grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
• Thomas Georgeson, actor, born 8 August 1936; died 18 March 2026
