Television Roles
Cole later became a respected television actor. During the 1960s and 1970s, he played numerous character parts on British television, usually as a disturbed and/or pathetic villain or victim. The television series he appeared in included Gideon's Way ("The Firebug", 1965), Out of the Unknown ( A Man of Our Times 1968)("The Last Lonely Man," 1969), UFO ("Flight Path", 1969), Menace ("Killing Time", 1970), Jack Rosenthal British Christmas television play Day To Remember (1986), and BBC comedy series Don't Forget To Write.
His most memorable television role was as crooked used-car dealer Arthur Daley in the Thames Television series Minder which he played from 1979 to the show's conclusion in 1994. The character became synonymous with the down-at-heel side of 1980s capitalism (along with Del Trotter of Only Fools and Horses). Cole played a similar character in late 1980s/early 1990s TV advertisements for the Leeds Permanent Building Society who was "Laughing all the way to the Leeds". In 1988, he voiced Vernon the mouse in the Children's ITV cartoon Tube Mice (in which Minder co-star Dennis Waterman also voiced a character).
Cole played Henry Root in the TV series Root Into Europe in 1992.
In 1995–96, he starred as businessman-councillor Freddie Patterson in An Independent Man, in which his wife Penny Morrell also appeared. He also starred as Brian Hook in the BBC Comedy Dad in the late 1990s alongside Kevin McNally, who played his son, Alan Hook. In addition, he starred in the mid-1990s ITV comedy series My Good Friend, playing a mischievous pensioner, and he later appeared alongside Timothy Spall and Annette Crosbie in the 2003 Channel 4 drama 'Bodily Harm'. He also made a one-off appearance in New Tricks.
He is able to hide his London accent when playing upper class characters, such as Sir Giles Lynchwood in the TV adaptation of Tom Sharpe's novel Blott on the Landscape. In 2007, Cole appeared in the BBC drama A Class Apart, in which he played a grandfather who encourages his impoverished daughter to keep her son on the straight and narrow by means of a public school bursary and The Dinner Party, broadcast in September 2007.
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