Richard Davies: Character actor best known as sarcastic Mr Price in sitcom ‘Please Sir!’

He played Mr Pritchard in the Burton/Taylor production of ‘Under Milk Wood’ – a pleasure for a Dylan Thomas fan

Davies as Mr Price in ‘Please Sir!’: the smile was untypical of the character (REX FEATURES)

None of the teachers at Fenn Street School had an easy time at the hands of their pupils, and the maths and science teacher Mr Price, for one, was perpetually exasperated. He was, though, of a philosophical bent, and his sarcastic wit was one of the most appealing features of Please Sir!, the ITV sitcom that often attracted up to 20m viewers between 1968 and 1972.

Along with the bumbling headmaster Mr Cromwell (Noel Howlett), his terrifying deputy Miss Ewell (Joan Sanderson) and the doddering Mr Smith (Erik Chitty) – as well the show’s star, John Alderton, as Bernard Hedges, just out of teacher training college – Price was long-suffering as he coped with pupils who would clearly rather be elsewhere. There was a spin-off film of the same name and a follow-up, The Fenn Street Gang, both of which also profited from Mr Price’s mordant wit.

Dennis Wilfred Davies was born in Dowlais, Merthyr Tydfil; his father was a railway guard. He left school at 14 to go down the pits; on one occasion he was terrified to be left in the dark alone when there was a power failure. He soon left to go into acting, initially with a theatre company in Colwyn Bay. He married his landlady’s daughter, but although the union produced a son, it was short-lived.

His professional progress was interrupted by the outbreak of war, and he trained as a military policemen but mostly served in an entertainment unit in Africa. In the 1950s he joined the Old Vic, as well as taking on small roles on TV and in films (he made an uncredited appearance as a cab-driver in The Lavender Hill Mob).

Between 1962 and 1965 he had a recurring role as a police snitch in Z-Cars, later appearing in its spin-off Softly, Softly. He also had a small part as the real-life Victoria Cross recipient Private 593 Jones in Zulu (1964), with a line that prefigured the sardonic wit of Mr Price. When an officer from the Natal Mounted Police fetches up, Jones tartly observes, “Come to arrest the Zulus.”

After Please Sir! Davies played Mr Pritchard in the Burton/Taylor production of Under Milk Wood – a role that must have been immensely pleasing for a passionate Dylan Thomas fan – and went on to appear in series such as Dixon of Dock Green, The Sweeney and Van der Valk, and impersonate the Welsh union leader Clive Jenkins in a spoof edition of Question Time on Not the Nine O’Clock News.

He played Idris Hopkins, the long-suffering foundry worker whose wife and daughter ran the corner shop in Coronation Street between 1974 and 1975, then from 1974-78 played Clive, the excitable Welsh member of the working men’s club committee in Oh No, It’s Selwyn Froggitt! the ITV sitcom starring Bill Maynard as a hapless council worker. Davies, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, was last seen on television in a 1998 episode of the comedy 2point4 Children.

Dennis Wilfred Davies (Richard Davies), actor: born Dowlais, Merthyr Tydfil 25 January 1926; married firstly Beryl Armstrong (marriage dissolved; one son), secondly Jill Britton (one daughter, one son); died Conford, Hampshire 8 October 2015.