David Daker, who has died aged 90, was a character actor best known for his role in the popular ITV comedy-drama Boon as Harry Crawford, the entrepreneurial friend of Ken Boon, a fellow former firefighter played by Michael Elphick.

Elphick portrayed a self-styled modern-day Lone Ranger riding around on his motorcycle doing odd jobs and some private investigating, while Daker’s character was a less than successful businessman running hotels, a ballroom and a country club. The pair team up to establish CBS (Crawford Boon Security), and the bond formed between them brought the show audiences of up to 15 million over seven series (1986-92) and a final episode in 1995.

One notable story had Boon and Crawford locked in a security vault after interrupting a robbery, reminiscing about their days in the fire service and mulling over the meaning of life.

Set around Birmingham, then Nottingham, the programme was also memorable for its theme song, Hi Ho Silver, which became a Top 10 hit for Jim Diamond in 1986.

Daker’s television career originally took off with a run of more than 80 episodes in the BBC drama Z Cars, as PC Owen Culshaw (1967-68), although the actor recalled him as “a rather colourless character”. He went on to play parts in treasured sitcoms such as Only Fools and Horses and Porridge, as well as appearing in Coronation Street and Doctor Who.

The youngest of five children, David was born in Bilston, in the Black Country, to Olive (nee Cutler) and Elijah Daker, a shoe factory worker. He showed his performing talents at infant school. “I clearly remember playing a cow and falling so that its legs splayed about – and enjoying it when the others laughed and applauded,” he recalled. Later, aged 13 at Etheridge (now Moseley Park) secondary school, he played Long John Silver in a production of Treasure Island.

But his parents wanted him to find a steady occupation, so he trained as a draughtsman with a firm making water softeners, then walked out after two years. “I simply came home one day and announced that I was finished with a nine-to-five job,” Daker recalled.

Weeks later, he joined the Oxford Playhouse Theatre School, before doing national service in the RAF, then gaining experience with Oldham Rep as a stage manager, actor and director (1957-60).

During a long stint at Salisbury Playhouse (1960-65), first as a director, then actor, he starred as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1964).

He moved on to the Alexandra theatre, Birmingham (1965), the Everyman, Cheltenham (1965-67), and the Castle, Farnham (1970), then made his London debut as Hephaestus in Prometheus Bound at the Mermaid theatre (1971).

An audition with the celebrated director Lindsay Anderson led to roles at the Royal Court (1971-72) before Daker appeared with the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych theatre as Shokhin in The Zykovs, Chuck in The Iceman Cometh (both 1976) and Reg Drummond in Privates on Parade (1977).

He returned to the West End in Saint Joan at the Strand (now Novello) theatre in 1994, with Imogen Stubbs in the title role. “As Warwick’s testy chaplain, De Stogumber, David Daker for once makes the real voice of Bernard Shaw heard,” wrote David Murray in the Financial Times. “A plain, thick Englishman, he fulminates and blusters vengefully, but when the chips go down he is overcome with simple horror.”

On TV he took endless roles in both dramas and comedies. After Z Cars, his RAF experience was handy for the part of one of the national service conscripts in a 1975 TV version of Arnold Wesker’s play Chips With Everything. Then he acted the brutal miner husband in The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1976), from a DH Lawrence story, and the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess in Holocaust (1978).

In the adventure series Dick Turpin (1979-82), starring Richard O’Sullivan, Daker played the highwayman’s former army nemesis, Captain Nathan Spiker.

He followed this with Only Fools and Horses, in which in 1982 he played Tommy Mackay, the violent estranged husband of a woman who is dating Rodney (Nicholas Lyndhurst), and gets into a fight with Del Boy (David Jason) when he mistakes him for his cheating wife’s lover. Earlier, Daker was involved in a brawl with another fondly remembered sitcom character, Godber (Richard Beckinsale), in a 1977 episode of Porridge.

He had two roles in Coronation Street, as Basil Griffin (1968-69), whose wife leaves him for an uninterested Len Fairclough, and Gordon Lewis, an unpopular relief manager at the Rovers Return three times between 1981 and 1985. He also appeared twice in Doctor Who, as the 13th-century robber baron Irongron in The Time Warrior adventure (1973-74) and the spacecraft commanding officer Rigg in Nightmare of Eden (1979).

Demonstrating his range, he played classical roles in the BBC’s Shakespeare productions of King Henry VI and Richard III (both 1983), as well as Brother Benjamin in the second series of the Salvation Army sitcom Hallelujah! (1984), alongside Thora Hird. Later, he starred in the BBC drama Crown Prosecutor (1995) as Ben Campbell, one of the lawyers handling criminal cases for the Crown Prosecution Service.

In films, he played the father of the boy on a voyage through time and space in Time Bandits (1981) and the police desk sergeant in I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle (1990), with Elphick as his boss.

In 1957, Daker married Stella Newton; they later divorced. They had a son, Tim, and a daughter, Pippa, who had multiple sclerosis and died in 1997. The following year Daker was found guilty of assault over a parking dispute, but, accepting he was under stress, magistrates gave him a conditional discharge.

He is survived by his second wife, Hilary (nee Voisey), their daughter, Rebecca, his son, Tim, and a sister, Hazel.