Career
Before turning to professional acting Whately began his working life as a folk singer, and still plays guitar, performing for charity concerts: Along with other Auf Wiedersehen, Pet stars, he makes an appearance at the biennial benefit concert Sunday for Sammy in Newcastle. Before becoming an actor, he started training as an accountant.
His acting career includes several stage plays, among them an adaptation of Twelve Angry Men and film appearances in The Return of the Soldier, The English Patient, Paranoid and Purely Belter.
Whately's television appearances include episodes of Shoestring, Angels, Juliet Bravo, Strangers, Coronation Street, Shackleton, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, Inspector Morse, Alas Smith and Jones, Look and Read, You Must Be The Husband, B&B, Peak Practice, Skallagrigg, The Broker's Man, Murder in Mind, 2003 Comic Relief Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, Lewis, New Tricks, Who Gets the Dog?, The Children and Silent Cry. Whately provided one of the voices for the English language version of the 1999 claymation Children's television series Hilltop Hospital. He has also appeared in an advert for Water Aid doing a voice over.
In both an episode of Miss Marple ("A Murder Is Announced" - 1985) and in an episode of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, (starring Jeremy Brett), Whately played a police Detective Sergeant, as he was later to do in Inspector Morse.
Perhaps his most memorable television appearances were as Detective Sergeant Lewis, the down-to-earth complement to the cranky intellectual Inspector Morse. He reprised the role in the spin-off series Lewis, in which Lewis returns to Oxford as a full Inspector. With his new partner, the Cambridge-educated Detective Sergeant James Hathaway (Laurence Fox), Inspector Lewis solves murder mysteries while trying to rebuild his life after his wife's sudden death in a hit-and-run accident, and to gain recognition from his sceptical new boss.
Richard Marson's book celebrating fifty years of Blue Peter comments that Whately auditioned as a presenter for the show in 1980 but lost out to Peter Duncan.
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