In a career stretching over thirty years, he was a character actor in British television productions in the 1970s and 1980s, usually in smaller parts or as a support playing a worldly-wise everyman.
He also wrote a stage musical entitled Jack the Ripper (1974), about the Victorian murder spree in London in the late 1880s, which is regularly produced by amateur theatre groups and companies around the globe.
[2] In the mid-1950s, he enlisted as an Aircraftman with the Royal Air Force as part of the United Kingdom's National Service military training system, being stationed in Egypt.
[6] In the late 1960s to mid-1970s, he worked at the Mermaid Theatre in London, where he acted in productions of the plays Bernard (1969), and the musical The Band Wagon (1969).
[7] Whilst at The Mermaid, he directed productions of the stage plays The Goblet Game (1968); Lock Up Your Daughters (1969, also acted in); Treasure Island (1969, also acted in); Enter Solly Gold (1970), Henry IV, Part 1 & Henry IV, Part 2 (1970), and the self-written, directed and produced Dick Turpin (1970).
[8] He acted the role of Jaffee in an episode of the television Victorian crime series The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1971), and played Sgt.
Pember played Belgian Resistance fighter and morse-code radio operator Alain Muny in the BBC's World War II drama Secret Army, from 1977 to 1979.
In 1983, he appeared briefly in the role of Baz, the unenthusiastic Chairman of the Tenants' Association in the BBC sitcom Only Fools and Horses, in an episode entitled "Homesick".
He also appeared with Maggie Ollerenshaw in the 1985 tragi-comic spoof documentary 'Swim The Channel' in Victoria Wood As Seen On TV as parents who forget they have any children.
In 1987 Pember began playing the role of Dennis Timson in the legal drama series Rumpole of the Bailey, which he continued with for the next 6 years until his retirement from acting.