Tim Preece (born 5 August 1938 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire) is an English actor, prominent in 1970s television.He played the politically correct Tom Patterson in the first two series of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976–77) and The Legacy Of Reginald Perrin (1996) and also had a role in the Doctor Who serial "Planet of the Daleks" (1973). He later appeared as the editor of a local newspaper in 'The Journalist' an episode of People Like Us (2001) with Chris Langham.