Paul Angelis is remembered for one recording session: the flat Liverpool mumble of Ringo and the shriek of the Chief Blue Meanie in Yellow Submarine. Behind it sits a long, unshowy television career, much of it spent in a police uniform.
Fi1m perspective
The Chief Blue Meanie in Yellow Submarine (1968) giggles before he does anything cruel, and the giggle is the performance. Paul Angelis pitches him as a shrieking aristocrat, all tantrums and small squeals of pleasure, and then in the same film flattens his own Liverpool accent into Ringo's mumble, as if a different man had walked into the booth. He also narrates the opening and shares George with Peter Batten, who goes uncredited, and if you listen you can hear the join. He is good at the Beatle and good at the villain, which is more than the film manages between its songs.
That session is most of what the cinema has of him, and it came near the start. Angelis spent six years in merchant banking before training at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and began acting in the late 1960s, so he arrived with a bank clerk's steadiness and a Dingle accent, and television knew what to do with both. He was PC Bruce Bannerman in Z-Cars for 128 episodes between 1967 and 1969, and for the best part of forty years afterwards he was the policeman, or the man the policeman is talking to, in The Sweeney, The Bill and Juliet Bravo. The films were occasional: Mike Rawlins, Alf Garnett's son-in-law, in The Alf Garnett Saga (1972); Karageorge in For Your Eyes Only (1981).
In between he turned up in Porridge (1974) as Navy Rum, a tattooed old seafarer passing through Slade Prison, and it tells you what kind of actor he was that our review of the series does not mention him. That is not a complaint. The British character actor's job was to be exactly the right size for the scene and leave nothing behind, and Angelis did it in programmes that did not depend on him and did not need to.
What he could do when a film let him is on the record in Pepperland. When the Meanies reach the bandstand and the colour drains out of the band mid-song, the Chief's delight in it frightened us more than we expected, and it is Angelis's giggle that does the frightening; the drawing is only a blue face and a glove. His hatred of music is the one idea the film takes seriously, and he takes it seriously too. Nobody drew him a second villain. Somebody should have.
Biography
Paul Angelis (18 January 1943 – 19 March 2009) was an English actor. He was born in the Dingle district of Liverpool to an English mother and a Greek father, and trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama after working in merchant banking.
He is known for playing Navy Rum in the BBC sitcom Porridge (1974), PC Bruce Bannerman in 128 episodes of Z-Cars, and providing the voices of Ringo Starr, George Harrison, the Chief Blue Meanie and the narrator in the animated film Yellow Submarine (1968). His other credits include the role of Karageorge in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only (1981) and appearances in series such as Coronation Street and EastEnders. He was the older brother of actor Michael Angelis.
