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!
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