Do we like David Graham?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A long, quiet career with no harmful words or acts found and warm tributes from colleagues, though the record is thin on big public causes.
Nothing new on him lately, because David Graham died in September 2024, aged 99. His death was reported widely, with Anderson Entertainment, the company behind Thunderbirds, among the first to pay tribute. So this is a look back at a very long career, not a live scandal.
Graham was born in London in 1925. He served in the RAF as a radar mechanic, then trained as an actor in New York. He got into television in 1958 after meeting Gerry Anderson, and that meeting shaped the rest of his working life.
For Anderson he voiced Gordon Tracy, Brains, Kyrano and, most famously, Parker, Lady Penelope's cockney chauffeur, from 1965. The cast crowded round one microphone and recorded it like a radio play, so he'd sometimes be talking to himself several times on one page. He told the NZ Herald in 2015 that Parker was “in my vocal DNA, as it were”.
He also helped create the original Dalek voices in Doctor Who in the 1960s, working in a staccato style that was then run through a synthesiser. He even recorded fresh Dalek lines in 2023 for The Daleks in Colour. Younger fans knew him as Grandpa in Peppa Pig, which he voiced from 2004.
On the harm test, we found nothing: no harmful words about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, no stints with culture-war outfits, and no lawsuits or allegations. That is a fair result but a thin one, as he was a working actor who rarely spoke publicly about politics, and we found no big public causes either.
What's on record is people being fond of him. Jamie Anderson, Gerry's son, said Graham was “always kind and generous with his time and his talent”, and fans sang him happy birthday at a Gerry Anderson concert weeks before he died. He retired from Parker in 2021 and voiced him one last time in a January 2024 Scalextric promo.