Peter Firth - from Scooper to Spooks

“Get On board. Get on board. Come and join the Double Deckers…!”   This was the lively refrain I regularly heard, and probably sung, around the ages of 9 or 10. Here Come the Double Deckers started on Friday afternoons in the Crackerjack slot in Jan 1971. I associate the show with Saturday mornings so it may be that most of my viewing was for the repeat run the following year. If I had the patience to sit through one of the seventeen episodes on YouTube I’d probably cringe, but at least it’ll surely be more palatable to a nostalgic 58 year-old than its contemporary, The Banana Splits!

But I digress….. The Double Deckers were a gang of kids who had adventures on and around an old bus dumped in a London junk yard, and they were led by Scooper, played by a 16 year-old who surely looked and acted younger than his years: Peter Firth.

Unlike many actors included in my TV Treasures, Firth hasn’t been an ever-present in my TV life. However whenever he has cropped up it’s invariably in something memorable. In the Seventies he earned rave reviews and scooped awards for his role on stage and screen in Equus, much as another, albeit substantially wealthier child star was to do a generation later, Daniel Radcliffe. This kept him from the TV until he appeared in a quirky Play For Today, The Flip Side of Dominick Hyde in 1980. I probably watched it out of curiosity to see how a Double Decker would look a decade on.

Comedies in that drama strand were rare so, like the Mike Leigh works, they gave me a reason to watch with the folks. I think the lead character was some kind of alien interloper whose wide-eyed innocence in contemporary Britain made for some entertaining encounters, and Firth seemed made for the part. It was so popular that he reprised it in a follow-up a year or two afterwards.

There followed another domestic TV hiatus, at least in my own experience. Peter Firth never achieved movie star status but he made a fair few films in the 1980s and ‘90s, the only ones I watched being A Letter to Brezhnev and The Hunt for Red October, in each case portraying a young Russian sailor. 

Then, of course, in a post-Cold War twist of fate, he began a ten-year stint as the UK’s MI5 chief in Spooks. After ceding ground to namesake Colin Firth for so many years suddenly in 2002 it was Peter‘s name associated with a high-ratings series.

I really enjoyed Spooks. I don’t think I really latched onto it until the second run, certainly missing the notorious scene when Lisa Faulkner was deep-fat-fried! The plots stretched the imagination but the context of current paranoia surrounding arms deals to dictators, Al-Qaeda terrorists, shady Russians and even shadier elements within the British Establishment somehow made the narrative plausible.

The writers were also unafraid to kill off leading characters, always a laudable trait in an age of obsession with happy endings. Besides being mistaken for a helping of chips, stars were variously victims of explosions, poisonings, torture, executions, suicide and of dodgy double-agents embedded in the good old ‘Grid’. Matthew MacFadyen, Rupert Penry-Jones, Keeley Hawes, David Oyelowo, Gemma Jones, Richard Armitage and Hermione Norris all came and went but Peter Firth’s solid, unsmiling, permanently-pressured Harry Pearce managed to survive the carnage, albeit at what personal cost? We all rooted for him, especially in his will-they-won’t-they relationship with Nicola Walker’s intelligence analyst Ruth. Admittedly Spooks was becoming darker in the final series but its eventual demise in 2011 left a glaring gap in the schedules. Still, best to quit while ahead.

Fortunately it didn’t signal the end of Peter Firth on the box over here, even if he hasn’t claimed above-the–title prestige. In 2014, he was a devious doctor in the diverting but instantly forgettable ITV thriller Undeniable (I had to look it up to remind me) then in 2019’s psycho-stalker four-parter Cheat he played the dad of the lead, and on the list of potential baddies.

One thing is missing, though. After playing Harry, Peter Firth has specialised in roles requiring middle-class, middle-aged grumpy businessmen of uncertain morals. It would be wonderful if a casting director could take a punt on the actor whose smile once lit up the face of Scooper and Dominick Hyde. He must still be there under that stodgy exterior and I hope I don’t have to wait another two decades to witness it!

Miranda Richardson - extraordinarily ordinary

Miranda Richardson is a rarity amongst top-notch actors. If I say Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Olivia Colman or Sarah Parish, chances are your brain will instantly conjure up a clear image. Yet with Miranda, for some reason it’s not so straightforward. Researching pictures for this piece she would call to mind the likes of Jo Joyner, Geri Horner, Hermione Norris and, at a pinch, Sharon Small. How come?

Possessing a face which is not conventionally beautiful in a Hollywood sense and lacking quirky characteristics must be a mixed blessing in her industry. Arguably, lack of instant recognition may have cost her roles in some blockbuster movies and yet her open features benefit such a talented all-rounder eager to avoid typecasting. Nobody can accuse her of playing safe.

Miranda Richardson has graced our screens in every genre from knockabout comedy to melodrama and even classic Aardman animation. With an extensive legacy of roles in theatre and cinema, it’s amazing how much TV she has managed to pack into a forty-year career. This exploded into life when she won rave reviews portraying Ruth Ellis in the film ‘Dance with a Stranger’ in 1985. I’ve still never seen it so cannot comment but, despite two subsequent Oscar nominations in the Nineties, she didn’t vanish up her own arse and adopt the Hollywood lifestyle. It may have been a different story had she accepted what became the Glenn Close role in ‘Fatal Attraction’!

Instead of being remembered as a bunny-boiling, knife-wielding psycho, Richardson grabbed the TV public’s heart as a head-chopping, acolyte-teasing Queen Elizabeth in Blackadder II. Capable of switching from ruthless tyrant to six year-old spoilt brat chucking her toys out of her pram, her ‘Queenie’ was sheer delight, ensuring the character held her own alongside the stellar line-up of Eighties alternative comedy. She guest-starred in subsequent Blackadder series but it wasn’t all Ben Elton knob gags or historical farce. 

I thought Richardson was great in a Screen Two mystery drama After Pilkington. Written by theatre royalty Simon Gray, it was the sort of highbrow comedy that Mum, Dad and I could enjoy as counterpoint to the joyous nonsense of contemporary sitcoms such as Allo Allo or Last of the Summer Wine. Alongside co-star Bob Peck, another TV regular at the time, I loved the way she effortlessly stole scenes from the carpet-chewing Barry Foster and a pre-Dibley Gary Waldhorn, earning a BAFTA nomination.

The same year she appeared with the Comic Strip regulars in the cinema release Eat The Rich, later broadcast on Channel 4 and my ’89 diary sung the praises of the Christmas screening on BBC1 of the Andrew Davies comedy Ball Trap on the Cote Sauvage, in which Miranda starred with Jack Shepherd and Zoe Wanamaker. The following year she moved into political thriller territory in the enjoyable six-parter Die Kinder but then she had the temerity to bugger off from the small to silver screen, including the award-winning Damage, The Crying Game, Tom & Viv and Sleepy Hollow

Fortunately, while movie success seemed to finish the TV careers of Pauline Collins and Imelda Staunton, Miranda came back in the late Nineties. Around that time, the Beeb adapted a string of Minette Walters thrillers, and in The Scold’s Bridle Richardson teamed up again with Bob Peck and the young star of the time, Douglas Hodge. Against all expectations, she even helped make a jolly costume romp palatable for me, when starring with a youthful Anna Friel in All For Love in 1999.

Apart from voicing the evil Mrs Tweedy in the Christmas TV staple Chicken Run (soon to be reprised!), I completely lost track of Ms R in the new millennium. She was in films I never saw, TV series which didn’t appeal and theatre productions I could never get to. That didn’t really end until 2018’s Girlfriends. Kay Mellor’s ITV serial featured Miranda as a glamorous middle-aged fashion magazine editor whose comfy world begins to crumble.  Although she shared top billing with Phyllis Logan and Zoe Wanamaker it’s definitely Richardson whose performance sticks in the brain.

Yet for all the Oscar nominations and BAFTA awards for drama, to enjoy her highpoint I have to retrace my steps to the golden age of Blackadder, and especially The Third. She only appeared in one episode, as Amy, the sweet virginal apple of Edmund’s eye who (spoiler alert) turns out to be a notorious ‘highwayman’ The Shadow. I know it’s childish but when she shoots a squirrel which emits a toy-like squeak I cried with laughter. Well, if it passed Ben Elton’s quality control it was good enough for my own silly sense of humour. It also just serves to show what a versatile actor she is. I could never mistake her for anyone else.

Michael Wood - Crumpet in jeans?

As the son of a history teacher I suppose it was inevitable that I would develop a keen interest in discovering and understanding the past. It’s in the blood. School nurtured it further but the enthusiasm was fleshed out by frequent visits to assorted castles, stately homes and archaeological sites dotted around the South of England.

The Romans held a special space for me, a flame kindled by lessons at the age of seven or eight and truly ignited by a visit to the Eternal City itself in my teens. Living in Essex we were also fortunate to have close

encounters with relics from the Anglo-Saxon era, including St Cedd’s simple stone chapel at Bradwell, Greensted Church and the Battle of Maldon site, its crossed-swords symbol and date 991 leaping out from our local Ordnance Survey map.

In my younger days, my thirst for knowledge wasn’t easily quenched by television. With Mum and Dad I might watch the occasional Chronicle documentary while Blue Peter may have offered tasty features and later there was Johnny Ball’s light-hearted children’s series Cabbages and Kings. I associated TV history for grown-ups with stuffy old blokes with beards and pipes, presenters like Rene Cutforth and Fyfe Robertson. Then along came Michael Wood. The mould was broken.

Here was a bloke who, while nonetheless a bit on the posh side, appeared not a lot older than me. Tall and striking, he strode around bleak moors and marshes as if he belonged, clad in fur-lined anorak and tight jeans. The media dubbed him the ‘thinking woman’s crumpet’ (presumably to counter-balance Joan Bakewell’s claim on the thinking man) but to me he was a presenter who, in his In Search of…. series, really brought his subject to life before my very eyes.

I think I missed the first programmes, tucked away on BBC2 when I was a struggling student in my second term at Exeter. However, when the second series aired in March 1981 on BBC1 I was quickly hooked. My contemporary diary noted: “Few presenters…have managed to inject such enthusiasm and imagery into the events of the Dark Ages” and nobody I’ve seen since has altered that view.

The blue touchpaper was lit by Wood’s In Search of Athelstan. While his granddad Alfred the Great has a slightly higher profile thanks to the myth of his failed audition for Bake Off, I’d never heard of the tenth-century king. This stirring tale of war, politics, religion and legal reform changed all that. There was no budget for a cast of hundreds in full costume, warpaint and weaponry recreating bloody battles, scenes we take for granted in modern historical documentaries. There were not a lot of relics or pictures to use either; it’s not called the Dark Ages for nothing. However, with a few images of flickering flames, crashing waves and a soundtrack of occasional bloodcurdling cries, it’s Wood’s calm, composed yet dramatic narration which is so effective at telling the story.

I was probably back in the family home for the rest of the series, including Eric Bloodaxe, Ethelred and William the Conqueror. Obviously most of the information imparted has long since slipped the memory but not the impact of Michael Wood’s style of presentation. A few years later I ensured I viewed the BBC’s Great Little Railways series, which included an episode tracking the line from Athens to Olympia. Obviously it held dual appeal for a train and history enthusiast like me, but it lacked one vital ingredient. Wood’s lucid narration was present and correct but the man himself was never on screen. Plenty of moustachioed Greeks but no clean-shaven Manchester academics. It would have resonated more with me had I visited the Peleponnese myself, but I wouldn’t explore that corner of Greece for another fourteen years, not by rail but aboard a Cosmos coach.

Since those early Dark Ages documentaries, Michael Wood’s series - or at least the ones I watched – have been few and far between. His broadcast contribution to the BBC Domesday 900 project struck a resounding chord in 1986 (William the Conqueror again) then five years lapsed before I tuned into another landmark series, Legacy: The Origins of Civilisation. Instead of misty moors in Northumberland, Michael got to mingle with the natives and enthuse reverently about artefacts and ancient ruins in far-flung foreign lands like Iraq, India and China.

In ’98, he was off to the Middle East again In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great, crossing deserts and threading mountain passes by various modes of transport, including a horse in Iran, but the next time his face appeared on my telly he was back in the Dark Ages filling the extensive gaps in my knowledge of Alfred the Great. His face was considerably more lined but the familiar presentation techniques and production values were as brilliant as ever.

Excellent history presenters with charisma and credibility are plentiful these days. From Simon Schama to Lucy Worsley, Bettany Hughes to Dan Snow and Jonathan Meades to Neil Oliver, I have enjoyed many televisual trips into the past in their company. However, for all the superior special effects at their disposal, in my opinion none quite match the story-telling of Michael Wood.

Cherie Lunghi - the ultimate manageress

Ahhhh, Cherieeee Lunghiiiiiiiiiiiii. Oh, sorry. Er, where was I? Oh, yes. Well, she always did have a mesmeric effect on me.

Those almond-shaped eyes first sparkled into my consciousness back in 1984 when, my diary records, she appeared in three quite different major dramatisations which we Smiths watched at home.

The first was a BBC adaptation of CP Snow’s Strangers and Brothers novels. It wasn’t my usual TV fare but if memory serves I became quite engrossed in this somewhat earnest series. How much of that was down to Cherie Lunghi’s acting as the wife of Shaughan Seymour’s lead character I couldn’t say but it certainly introduced her name to my vocabulary. And what a name! An exotic mix of Italian father and alluring French first name was bound to stick in the minds of casting directors and audiences alike, even if she hailed from humble Nottingham.

She did make an impact a few months later when she cropped up in Master of the Game, one of those glossy Sidney Sheldon saga mini-series so beloved of American TV in the Eighties. Dyan Cannon was the star but I had eyes only for Cherie. In my diary she received the rare accolade of an individual name-check, and a description as “delicious”.  Looking back, this seems a peculiar choice of adjective, and yet I trotted it out again later in the year following her appearance in the “exciting, absorbing” crime thriller Praying Mantis. Obviously this twenty-something’s TV taste buds had been well and truly tickled.

In ’86, she brightened the bleak but gripping Alan Bleasdale Great War drama The Monocled Mutineer which so wonderfully wound up Prime Minister Thatcher and her acolytes. However her first starring role I remember witnessing was as Channel 4’s The Manageress. It became  required viewing for Dad and me in 1989 and 1990. Football and Cherie Lunghi: how could they go wrong? It portrayed an attractive woman making her way in a malevolent masculine world, with club chairman Warren Clarke and old-fashioned trainer Tom Georgeson needing to be won over by Gabriella Benson’s football tactics rather than her vital statistics. The excellent cast, and credible on-pitch action, made it work. At the time, there was lively debate about the likelihood of a female football manager in real life; it was widely considered inevitable. Yet here we are thirty years later and, for all the progress made by women’s football, gender equality in the men’s game dugout looks as distant as ever. Perhaps if QPR could sign up Ms Lunghi our luck might change. Let’s face it, in the last twenty-five years, all the men have failed.

I didn’t notice her as often in the following two decades but according to the IMDB website she never really went away. I know she cropped up as a guest in various cop shows such as Wexford, Lynley and Lewis mysteries. I definitely saw Cherie in one of the later Touch of Frost series, clashing memorably with David Jason’s irascible inspector. She was also a crown prosecutor (Helen West) in an enjoyable one-off BBC film A Question of Guilt back in ’93 but, by the time ITV made a series from the books featuring the character, the ubiquitous Amanda Burton got the gig.

Through the Nineties, Lunghi proved the perfect fit with Kenco’s marketing strategy, and she starred in umpteen TV adverts. However, for all her undeniable allure, Cherie never persuaded me to drink coffee. She never spurred me to dabble my two left feet in ballroom dancing either, but she was a popular competitor in the 2008 Strictly Come Dancing run. That must have been one of the first Strictly series I watched with any real enthusiasm and I’d love her to have won, although I was torn between her and Rachel Stevens! For the record, Tom Chambers claimed the glitterball trophy but never has there been a more elegant, and dare I say, sexy fifty-something on the show than Cherie Lunghi.

There have been numerous central casting upper-crust actresses on the telly over the years. From Joanna Lumley and Caroline Langrishe to Emilia Fox and Sophia Myles, they all play the ‘posh totty’ roles with great aplomb and yet Cherie Lunghi has the edge because she seems to portray such characters with more warmth and humanity. She is rarely the hard-hearted haughty cow; those eyes have plenty of sparkle but without the ice. And that seductive voice of hers could melt the coldest of hearts, too, such as when narrating a few series of Who Do You Think You Are?

Be she the lady of the manor, starchy matron, football manager or effortlessly elegant exponent of the waltz and cha-cha-cha, Cherie Lunghi is the ultimate class act.

Bill Giles - the Mildest Weather Forecaster

It’s easy to take weather presenters for granted. The forecasts are always there several times a day, rain or shine, straight after the main news bulletins and also play a major role in breakfast TV and regional news programmes. As part of the Beeb’s audience research department I carried out projects and analysis of viewing data which proved what I had long suspected, namely that the weather segment, if only a few minutes long, was the viewers’ favourite bit of the whole broadcast. 

Of course, whatever the medium, how the weather forecast is presented is crucial. ITV’s preference for a pretty woman smiling in front of a map displaying a few symbols for rain or sun has never cut it for me. Sian Lloyd actually made me switch channels just to avoid her over-precise diction and expressive hand gestures more suited to ballet than meteorology. It didn’t stop her enjoying a 24-year TV career, though.

No, I favour the Beeb’s policy of story-telling with complementary visual aids – just like any good presentation. When you have to squeeze what can be a complex narrative into two or three minutes, it’s more than mere science; it’s an art. So if it’s not Ms Lloyd, what makes the perfect weather presenter? For me, it’s a mix of professionalism and credibility, understated charisma, engaging smile in appropriate places and scripts which tell a story in language we all understand but don’t treat us like idiots.

We’ve all felt for the newbies who, despite likely intensive training, often present like a rabbit caught in headlights. I know; I’ve been in that position myself, only without millions of people hanging on my every word. However, they all seem to quickly bed in and become part of the on-screen furniture. 24 year-old Helen Young was a case in point. From a stuttering start she went on to lead the BBC team for three years before quitting to raise her family.

Many national weather presenters cut their teeth on regional programmes while others remained on their patch to become the most popular personalities on TV. In particular, I fondly remember from my university days up to twenty-first century holidays in Cornwall the friendly face and distinct West Country burr of Spotlight South West’s Craig Rich. There have been some memorable accents on national bulletins, too. Carol Kirkwood’s perpetually cheerful Highlands delivery brightened my mornings in the days I would watch BBC’s Breakfast News before the daily commute, and John Kettley’s trans-Pennines voice was an iconic ingredient of evening telly in the late Eighties and Nineties before he returned to radio.

I also have happy memories of Jim Bacon’s pudding basin haircut, fellow redhead Isobel Lang, Michael Fish’s strobing jackets, John Hammond’s inadvertent George Clooney impression and the sinister Rob McElwee who, with a unique turn of phrase and tendeny to lean into the lens, often seemed to be operating in a parallel universe. Then there’s the inimitable force of nature that was Ian McCaskill, whose presentation was so quirky that he became a mainstay of satirical puppet show Spittin’ Image and also Rory Bremner’s cast of impressions. However, the ‘weatherman’ who just about tops the lot is Bill Giles.

He may not have possessed the easy-going manner of today’s leading exponents like Darren Bett nor the larger-than-life personality of his contemporary McCaskill but Giles successfully bridged the eras of the troublesome magnetic map symbols and computer-generated graphics.

He is unique amongst weathermen that I actually saw him in the flesh, presenting lectures not once but twice, nearly two decades apart. The first was in, I think, 1981, not long after he started out on national TV. It was at Exeter University, not far from his Devonian roots. The second time was towards the end of his BBC career, giving a talk at the Royal Geographical Society in London. Like many weather broadcasters of his time he had started out as a Met Office scientist in the RAF before eventually ending up on air, and he had a fair few stories to tell. A shame he wasn’t allowed to relate them all!

Bill Glles may have expanded his waistline between this informal farmers’ forecast (lots of isobars but curiously no temperatures) in 1984 and his grey-haired dotage on a wet and windy New Year’s Eve in 1997, but he didn’t change that much in terms of presentation. His light grey jacket was never far from our screens, even on Christmas Day, projecting just the right blend of formal and smart casual. Like Angela Rippon behind her Seventies news desk, goodness knows what, if anything, he wore over his legs!

He was awarded an OBE in 1995 and retired five years later, and it seems like only yesterday. Reliving Bill’s old forecasts, he looks rather staid and stodgy compared with Tomasz Schafernaker or Lucy Verasamy but he always commanded attention with this keen (very) amateur student of meteorology. In some ways he was way ahead of his time, warning of climate change when it was most unfashionable and indeed frowned upon. The world needs more people like him.