[1] After leaving the army, Bishop enrolled at Boston University where he initially studied business administration but halfway through the course, transferred to drama, much against his parents' wishes.

In 1966 Bishop appeared in The Saint (S5, E8 'The Man Who Liked Lions') playing Tony Allard, a reporter friend of Simon Templar's who is murdered after a few lines.

In later years, he appeared in films such as Twilight's Last Gleaming, Saturn 3, Silver Dream Racer, and The Lords of Discipline.

He provided vocal work for the 1974 animated TV series of Star Trek, and appeared as Lieutenant Colonel Harrity in the final episode of the British World War II prisoner-of-war drama Colditz.

He continued to act on film, TV and radio, usually in British and European productions, and was a frequent guest at science fiction conventions.

They appeared together as NASA operatives in the opening of You Only Live Twice and as United States Navy sailors in The Bedford Incident, as well as the 1983 film of the Harold Robbins novel The Lonely Lady.

In 1989, Bishop was reunited with Rimmer and another Anderson actor, Matt Zimmerman, in the BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet.

He and Rimmer also toured together in theatre shows, including Death of a Salesman in the 1990s, and they both appeared in the BBC drama-documentary Hiroshima (2005), one of Bishop's last TV projects.

Bishop had already shown his disapproval of the military-industrial complex when, in 1993, he gatecrashed an arms-trade fair held in Aldershot, Hampshire whilst dressed to resemble Augusto Pinochet.

Its design is very similar to the one situated two metres (6 feet) on the right, which marks the grave of his son Daniel (16 May 1967 – 18 January 1988), who was killed in a car accident in Cumbria.