Obituary: Roy Skelton. actor and voice artist

As the actor who voiced Zippy and the Daleks he delighted and terrified children

Roy Skelton, actor and voice artist.

Born: 20 July, 1931, in Oldham.

Died: 8 June, 2011, in Brighton, aged 79.

Roy Skelton had a voice that was unforgettable. For nearly fifty years he provided the voice for such seminal characters as Zippy and George, the orange and pink puppets on ITV's long-running children's show Rainbow.

Skelton had first voiced the puppets in the early Seventies and did so until the programme was axed by ITV in 1992. Skelton reprised Zippy's voice in the BBC1 retro-drama Ashes to Ashes in 2008, and again in a special puppet edition of The Weakest Link.

Skelton was more than a pure voice-actor. He had the knack of adding life and colour to a puppet and was quickly able to adapt if things didn't go according to plan in the studio.

If Zippy and George were having an argument - which happened often - Skelton was up to the challenge. "It was great to tackle that" he once wrote. "I loved having an argument between the two of them."

Skelton would subtly change his voice to suit the character and its mood and would pick up immediately if one of the puppeteers went at a different delivery speed. Skelton also wrote more than one hundred Rainbow scripts which much enhanced the programme's dramatic quality.

He provided suitably oily and villainous voices for some of Doctor Who's historic rogues - including the Daleks, Cybermen and the Krotons. Generations of children hid behind the furniture as Skelton voiced the horrors of the Daleks and their confrontations with the Doctor.

His "Exterminate. Exterminate" in modulated, echoing tones were repeated for years to come. As he had demonstrated with Rainbow, Skelton had a vocal range that allowed him often to characterise several of the monsters at once.

"The Dalek voice must be kept at one level;" he explained. "But you can raise your tone when they get excited. When I was playing three or four Daleks I would vary the tone a little."

Roy Skelton started acting with his local Oldham repertory company and the Bristol Old Vic and was cast in cameo roles in major films such as Zulu and Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy. He did extensive work in television dramas - notably Z Cars, The Last of the Mohicans, and The Bill. He also appeared in the West End in such musicals as Wild Thyme, Oh! My Papa! and Chrysanthemum.

He began his impersonations when he was working on the BBC's Toytown where he played the irritable Mr Growser. That led to Sossidge the dog in Picture Book and the Lord Chamberlain and King Boris in Gordon Murray's Rubovian Legends. In turn those breaks led to his being selected for Doctor Who in 1966.

Initially Skelton provided the voice of the Monoids and later that year the voices of the Cybermen. He continued to appear with the programme - principally as a Dalek - until 1988.Skelton was also responsible for the chilling delivery of that other famous Dalek phrase: "That is an order! Obey!"

Skelton started working with Rainbow in 1971. Out of the blue he received a call from Pamela Lonsdale at Thames Television who was the producer of the programme and she asked him to take over the voice of Zippy. Skelton was enthusiastic and soon became a vital part of the production.

His scripts advanced the series from being purely a children's programme and allowed it to take on a cult status. He loved doing Zippy, the endearing creature with a zipped mouth, and once admitted, "as a joke, I used to say that I had based the voice of Zippy on Margaret Thatcher and Ian Paisley." George was based on a "rather camp pink hippo."

Skelton rather enjoyed the anonymity that his career brought him. "I can walk down the street and no one knows who I am," he told an interviewer.

"People don't say, 'There's Zippy', or ask me to say, 'Exterminate!' I sometimes wish they did." Often when people heard his voice, however, they would instantly recognise him

Skelton had an energy and skill about his work that was immediate and genuine. His voice was able to modulate and vary a character with subtlety that brought the puppets and inanimate objects alive in an instant for everyone.

His vocal projection and control added to the lasting pleasure of all the programmes on which he worked - especially Doctor Who and Rainbow - and his legacy is a host of loveable puppets and sci-fi objects that have enchanted children for the last four decades.

Skelton, who suffered a stroke at his home in Brighton, is survived by his wife Hilary and their two daughters.