Ray Alan

Alan was inspired to create Lord Charles (family motto: Semper Inebriate) in 1960, while watching a drunken aristocrat in the audience at the Satire Club off Jermyn Street. "I saw this chap sitting at a ringside table," Alan recalled, "dinner suit on, delightful young lady with him, and there he was patting her knee and pouring her champagne and saying: 'By Jove, you lovely thing, oh you lovely little thing.' And I thought what a wonderful character. But I couldn't find a face for him."

On his office wall, however, was a photo that Alan had been given by Laurel and Hardy after performing with them at a cabaret in 1954 (during the duo's last tour): "I looked at Stan Laurel's face and thought: 'That's the face I want.'"

Having been created by the great dummy maker of postwar England, Len Insull, who added a monocle and a saturnine aspect to Laurel's features, Lord Charles made his first television appearance in 1961 on the BBC pastiche music hall show The Good Old Days.

Such was Alan's success with Lord Charles that they appeared together on the programme more frequently than any other act. Then, in 1968, the duo became "joint hosts" of Ice Cabaret on BBC Two. With the huge rink on view in the background, Lord Charles, from his vantage point of the bar, would squiffily contemplate his whisky glass and demand: "Is there any ice in this place?"

With his frequent rejoinder "Silly ass", Lord Charles would introduce viewers into the cosy, Wodehouseian world of the peerage. "I dreamed the other day that I was giving a speech at the House of Lords, and d'y'know, when I woke up, I was."

Alcohol was a constant theme. Broaching matters Caledonian, he would assert: "It is not generally known that there's a lot of Scotch in me." Indeed, the ability to give Lord Charles a convincing slur epitomised Alan's virtuosity. With totally static lips, he could make his puppet drunkenly drawl the words "a big bottle of Polish slivovitz" – something many would struggle to say for themselves while sober.

Raymond Alan was born at Greenwich on September 18 1930, the son of a docker and grandson of a ratcatcher. He left school at 14 and began working as a hand at the Lewisham Hippodrome, by which time he was already a proficient magician. At the age of 15 he came first in a talent contest at the New Cross Empire, winning a professional engagement supporting The Singing Smiths.

Alan converted to ventriloquism when, still in his teens, he arrived on stage at the Woolwich Empire to find that his magician's box of tricks had been substituted by a stage hand for a box of tools. Inspired by a performance he'd seen by the great Spanish ventriloquist, Señor Wences, he launched into a voice-throwing routine, pretending that there was a tiny person trapped in the box.

The technique came very easily to him, and, finding that he was getting laughs straight away, he bought a mass-produced dummy which he invested with the character of the pageboy of whatever theatre he was performing at. The doll would cheek Alan, and take the mickey out of his actorly, southern tones.

Alan's natural ability quickly helped him take over as the nation's favourite ventriloquist from Peter Brough, whose radio show, Educating Archie, had been a big success in the Fifties. Alan was technically a much better "vent" than Brough, who was well suited to radio in that his lips moved when he did his act – which proved fatal when he attempted to transfer to television.

Alan, on the other hand, was perfect for the television age. Though he sometimes wore high neck jumpers to disguise the leaping of his Adam's apple, he was, with his respectable good looks, essentially a flawless performer. Indeed, he once arranged to have a series of X-ray photographs taken of his jaw whilst he did his act, and hardly any bluffing could be detected.

His material was always well-polished and amusing, and his comic skills allowed him to supplement his income by writing sketches for Morecambe and Wise and The Two Ronnies. It was also funny in an old-fashioned, family-oriented way (he hated more risqué material), which enabled him to turn his hand as easily to children's television as to cabaret for adults. Accordingly, in 1958 he made his television debut on Toytown, alongside the hero of which, Larry The Lamb, Alan introduced a new character reflecting the dawning space age: Mikki the Martian.

Though Lord Charles was his star turn throughout the Sixties, Alan also performed in that period with his two best-known characters for children (of which he was particularly proud), a small boy and his pet duck known as Tich and Quackers.

By 1970 Alan was a BBC regular, featuring as a debonair game show host on such blameless programmes as Where In The World and Three Little Words. His success, both live and on television, enabled him to move to a house at Cobham, Surrey, that been once been owned by the Labour Chancellor Sir Stafford Cripps, and acquire a wardrobe filled with silk socks and a range of natty blazers. But success never went to his head, and Alan – a fastidious, cautious, very practical man – was on the whole free of the eccentricities associated with his profession.

He regarded most other "vents" as straightforwardly mad, and would wearily, but amusingly, tell of the performer who had had his doll's wig made from his own hair, or of the time he had been summoned to the Astoria, Llanelli, to talk sense into an American who insisted on communicating with the theatre management only through the medium of his dummy.

Of his own doll, Lord Charles, he'd say: "He goes in a suitcase when I've finished a show, and if I don't work for another three months he never sees the light of day." Asked whether he felt silly making his living as a ventriloquist, Alan replied: "Not when I get the cheque."

In 1974 Alan commissioned a new Lord Charles from Mary Turner, who had made Lady Penelope for Thunderbirds. The new dummy had longer hair to keep up with the times, and was also bigger, possibly because Alan wanted to differentiate Lord Charles from another monocled dummy, Charlie McCarthy, wooden partner to the great ventriloquist of postwar America, Edgar Bergen. But if Alan was trying to break into the American market (and he was not an overwhelmingly ambitious man), he never succeeded.

In the 1980s the market for ventriloquism declined, partly in the face of competition from The Muppet Show. Alan's career became more low-key as he moved into the worlds of cruise ship entertainment and corporate events. In recent years he had three thrillers published: Death and Deception (2007); A Game of Murder (2008); and A Fear of Vengeance (2010).

He was twice married. His first marriage, to Greta, was dissolved in 1972; he subsequently lived for many years with Barbie; they often performed together as husband and wife, although she in fact merely changed her surname to Alan. His second wife, Jane, survives him.