Character actor who appeared in several sitcoms and was best known for his role as 'Horrible' Ives in Porridge
Though the actor Ken Jones, who has died aged 83 of cancer, was a television sitcom star in his own right, he is destined to be remembered in the supporting cast of the hugely popular Porridge, alongside Ronnie Barker's wily lag Norman Fletcher. He played "Horrible" Ives, who earned his nickname – from both inmates and warders – through displaying the loathsome qualities of being a creep and a snitch. Jailed for fraud, Bernard Ives was also a perpetual cheat, notable for starting his sentences with the words: "'Ere, listen."
Jones readily identified the key to Porridge's success. "If you get a closed environment like a prison and an anarchist like Fletcher trying to break the system, there's wonderful conflict," he told Richard Webber, co-author of Porridge: The Inside Story.
However, after appearing in half of the first series, in 1974, Jones left after just one episode of the following year's run. As the star of another sitcom, The Squirrels (pilot 1974, series 1975-77), set in the accounts department of a television rental company, he managed to juggle both recording schedules for a while. He worked on Porridge in the mornings and The Squirrels in the afternoons, but this eventually became unfeasible, although Jones did later appear in the 1979 film version of Porridge.
He was also in the 2003 spoof documentary Life Beyond the Box: Norman Stanley Fletcher. Whereas most of the former inmates were seen to have gone straight, Ives was shown collecting money for a fake charity.
Jones was born in the Everton district of Liverpool and, on leaving school, went into the building trade before working as a signwriter. He also acted with the amateur Merseyside Community theatre, where he met the actor-writer Sheila Fay, then a teacher. The couple ran a theatre in Liverpool and married in 1954.
Deciding to turn professional, both trained at Rada and, on graduating in 1958, joined Joan Littlewood's celebrated Theatre Workshop in Stratford, east London. Jones later reflected that Littlewood's ban on make-up forced actors to get inside characters without using artificial aids.
He made his TV debut in a 1962 episode of Probation Officer. Television producers and directors were then quick to cast him in one-off character roles in dozens of dramas and comedies. He appeared in seven Wednesday Play productions during the 1960s, including five directed by Ken Loach.
One of them was a surreal musical fantasy by the poet Christopher Logue and the composer Stanley Myers, The End of Arthur's Marriage (1965). It featured Jones in the lead role of a man using his father-in-law's £400 life savings, given to him as the deposit on a house, to go on a spending spree with his young daughter.
Jones's first sitcom starring role came in The Last of the Baskets (1971-72), in which he played Clifford Basket, a factory worker inheriting a stately pile as the 13th Earl of Clogborough. During his run as the accountant Rex in The Squirrels, he and his wife also starred in The Wackers (1975) as a couple, Billy and Mary Clarkson, bringing up their divided Liverpool family – half Protestant, half Catholic, half Liverpool football club supporters, half Everton supporters.
These programmes made Jones a familiar face on television. More sitcom roles followed, as Detective Sergeant Arnold Dixon, one of the police officers pitted against a family of petty criminals, in The Nesbitts Are Coming (1980), as boxing trainer Dave Locket in Seconds Out (1981-82), as Archangel Derek in the celestial comedy Dead Ernest (1982), and as the local authority gardener Tom in Valentine Park (1987-88).
He also popped up as Beryl's Uncle Dermot in the second and third runs (1971-72) of The Liver Birds (Fay played Beryl's mother) and Uncle Bernard in the 1991 series of Watching. In the children's series Behind the Bike Sheds (1985) he played Whistle Willie.
On the West End stage, Jones acted in Donald Howarth's A Lily in Little India (1966), Willy Russell's Breezeblock Park (1977) and Raymond Briggs's When the Wind Blows (1983).
Jones and Fay wrote many plays together, including Gulpin (1977), about a girl not wanting to be a bridesmaid when Liverpool football club are playing at home. It was televised by the BBC, with Jones directing.
Fay died last year, and Jones is survived by his sister, Edith.
• Kenneth Jones, actor, born 20 February 1930; died 13 February 2014