Dennis Waterman was a diamond in the rough whose greatest trick was letting others shine

He played hard-living womanisers with convincing swagger – but he was at his best when he was standing up for the little guy

Dennis Waterman’s great skill was letting his co-stars have the best lines – John Thaw’s Jack Reagan; “we’re the Sweeney son, and we haven’t had any dinner,” George Cole’s Arthur Daley; “the world’s my lobster’, Alun Armstrong’s Brian Lane; “I don’t creep, I glide,” – and yet still steal the scene.

His three key shows – the Sweeney in the 1970s, Minder in the 1980s and New Tricks in the noughties – touched their decade’s zeitgeist and all pulled in impressive ratings. Whilst Reagan’s gritty cop, Daley’s dodgy chancer and Lane’s melancholy crime solver personified the show’s vision, they all needed Waterman’s old fashioned phlegmatic laddishness to anchor them and he was a generous actor in letting his co-stars fly.

If DS George Carter, Terry McCann and ex-DS Gerry Standing shared certain features – slightly shady womanisers with bad habits and short tempers – it’s because Waterman was one of the few British actors who could make them loveable whilst never giving in to sentimentality.

Many actors play tough talking ex-boxers, but Dennis Waterman trained at Battersea’s Caius Boxing Club from the age of ten, so when – as hired muscle Terry McCann – he stared down a thug with a chippy sneer – "What, you fancy me or something?” – he felt like the real deal.

The son of a British Rail ticket collector from Clapham with a welterweight champion brother, he balanced this with his private stage school education a little uneasily. The teenage stage school kid shone through in his frequent attempts at pop success – peaking at number three in 1980 with the Minder theme tune I Could Be So Good for You – and a love of musical theatre. He peppered his career with roles in Oliver!, Windy City and My Fair Lady – and was mocked by Little Britain for singing the theme tune on almost every one of his TV shows bar, mercifully, the Sweeney.

Irresistible: Waterman with Patricia Hodge in 1986's The Life and Loves of a She DevilCredit:Bill Rowntree

New Tricks was, perhaps, the clearest measure of his personal appeal. The show’s success was unlikely in 2003, when TV venerated youth above all things and the idea of retired cops revisiting unsolved cold cases proving a prime-time hit had them sneering in their cocktails at the RTS bar. But the show was watched by 10 million at its height.

Waterman’s Standing – an honest copper regularly suspected of corruption – was a subtle take-down of his archetype. Standing is a jack-the-lad who doesn’t have the energy for new romances, is devoted to his kids and is something of a domestic goddess in the kitchen – a contrast Waterman clearly relished finding the comedy in. When he left in 2013, New Tricks’s ratings plummeted.

His working class hard men were never woke, but they weren’t thugs and leaned towards the sensitive rather than prejudiced. They were attractive diamonds in the rough always standing up for the little guy or girl – although Waterman blotted this copybook with his appearance on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories in 2012 where he admitted to slapping and punching his ex-wife Rula Lenska, adding that “it’s not difficult for a woman to make a man hit her.” It’s fair to say Terry McCann would have taken issue with this.