
Michael Elphick
Acting
Biography
Michael John Elphick was an English actor. Elphick was known in the UK for his trademark croaky voice and his work on British television, in particular his roles as the eponymous private investigator in the ITV series Boon and later Harry Slater in BBC's EastEnders. Elphick struggled with a highly publicised addiction to alcohol; at the height of his problem he admitted to consuming two litres of spirits a day, which contributed towards his death from a heart attack in 2002.
Known For

Play for Today is a British television anthology drama series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC1 from 1970 to 1984. During the run, more than three hundred programmes, featuring original television plays, and adaptations of stage plays and novels, were transmitted. The individual episodes were between fifty and a hundred minutes in duration.
Play for Today

Crown Court is an afternoon television courtroom drama produced by Granada Television for the ITV network that ran from 1972, when the Crown Court system replaced Assize courts and Quarter sessions in the legal system of England and Wales, to 1984.
Crown Court

The lives of Bodie and Doyle, top agents for Britain's CI5 (Criminal Intelligence 5), and their controller, George Cowley. The mandate of CI5 was to fight terrorism and similar high-profile crimes. Cowley, a hard ex-MI5 operative, hand-picked each of his men. Bodie is a cynical ex-SAS paratrooper and mercenary whose nature ran to controlled violence, while his partner, Doyle, comes to CI5 from the regular police force, and is more of an open minded liberal. Their relationship is often contentious, but they are the top men in their field, and the ones to whom Cowley always assigned to the toughest cases.
The Professionals

A one-hour anthology television series of one-off contemporary and classic dramas produced by the BBC.
Playhouse
Pebble Mill was a re-launched version of the 1970s daily chat show Pebble Mill (also known as Pebble Mill At One for a while) which aired on BBC1 in the United Kingdom. The series premiered on October 14, 1991. The show was a mixture of celebrity guests and music. Alan Titchmarsh was a presenter on the show throughout it's complete run. Other presenters included Judi Spiers, Gloria Hunniford and Ross King.
Pebble Mill

ITV Playhouse is a British comedy-drama TV series that ran from 1967 to 1983, which featured contributions from playwrights such as Dennis Potter, Rhys Adrian and Alan Sharp. The series began in black and white, but was later shot in colour and was produced by various companies for the ITV network, a format that would inspire Dramarama. Actors appearing in the series included Leslie Anderson, Gwen Nelson, Ricky Alleyne, Pat Heywood, Michael Elphick, Ian Hendry, Edward Woodward, Margaret Lockwood, Jessie Matthews and Lloyd Peters.
ITV Playhouse

Jack Regan, an unethical officer of the Flying Squad, uses unorthodox methods to pursue criminals with the help of his partner, George Carter.
The Sweeney

Justice is a British drama television series which originally aired on ITV in 39 hour-long episodes between 8 August 1971 and 16 October 1974. Margaret Lockwood stars as Harriet Peterson a female barrister in the North of England. It was made by Yorkshire Television and was based loosely on Justice Is a Woman, an episode of ITV Playhouse broadcast in 1969 in which Lockwood had previously also played a barrister. The theme music was Crown Imperial by William Walton.
Justice

Comedienne Dawn French tackles dark, tongue-in-cheek thrillers as her various characters embark on a different mystery every episode. In one way or another, she is involved with murder — either committing the crime or even getting bumped off herself!
Murder Most Horrid

Boon is a British television drama and modern-day western series starring Michael Elphick, David Daker, and later Neil Morrissey. It was created by Jim Hill and Bill Stair and filmed by Central Television for ITV. It revolved around the life of a modern-day Lone Ranger and ex-firefighter, Ken Boon.
Boon

Shoestring is a BBC detective drana set in Bristol and starring Trevor Eve as private detective Eddie Shoestring, who operatee his own show on Radio West, the local radio station. The programme ran between 30 September 1979 and 21 December 1980, in two series with 21 hour-long episodes. Eve opted not to return after two series, as he wanted to diversify into theatre, so the production team changed the setting to Jersey and created Bergerac, also following a detective returning to work after a bad period in his life.
Shoestring

Orson Welles’ Great Mysteries is a British television anthology series produced by Anglia Television for the ITV network and broadcast between 1973 and 1974. The series presents standalone adaptations of classic mystery, crime, and supernatural stories drawn from literary sources including Dickens, Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, Balzac, Maugham, O. Henry, and others. Each episode is framed by original introductory and closing sequences performed by Orson Welles, who serves as the series’ host and sole recurring on-screen presence. These segments, written and directed by Welles (uncredited), function as stylized narrative framing devices rather than dramatic participation in the stories themselves. The dramatic content of each episode is performed by separate casts and directors, with no continuing characters or serialized narrative, establishing the series as a unified television anthology rather than a collection of standalone films.
Orson Welles' Great Mysteries

New Scotland Yard is a police drama series produced by London Weekend Television for ITV from 1972 and 1974. It features the activities of two officers from the Criminal Investigations Department in the Metropolitan Police force headquarters at New Scotland Yard, as they dealt with the assorted villains of the day.
New Scotland Yard

Called out of retirement to settle the affairs of a friend, Smiley finds his old organization, the Circus, so overwhelmed by political considerations that it doesn't want to know what happened. He begins to follow up the clues of his friends past days, discovering that the clues lead to a high person in the Russian Secret service, and a secret important enough to kill for.
Smiley's People

A Victorian surgeon rescues a heavily disfigured man being mistreated by his "owner" as a side-show freak. Behind his monstrous façade, there is revealed a person of great intelligence and sensitivity. Based on the true story of Joseph Merrick (called John Merrick in the film), a severely deformed man in 19th century London.
The Elephant Man

Adapted from Forrest Wilson's books, the children's programme revolves around a grandmother with super powers and her arch nemesis, The Scunner Campbell.
Super Gran

Seven British construction workers escape Britain's ever growing dole queues and travel to Germany to work on a site in Dusseldorf. We follow their trials and tribulations of working away from home and away from the women they left behind.
Auf Wiedersehen, Pet
Harry is a television drama series produced by Union Pictures for the BBC, and shown on BBC1 between 18 September 1993 and 12 April 1995. The programme follows a journalist called Harry Salter, who ran a news agency in the English town of Darlington.
Harry

A young man journeys from a difficult childhood to maturity, exploring social injustice, personal development, and the complexities of human relationships.
David Copperfield

Victorian England, the late 1800s: Detective Sergeant Daniel Cribb of the newly formed Criminal Investigation Department (CID) is determined to remove crime from the streets of London using the latest detection methods.