Robert Lindsay - lovable leftie and testy dentist

Robert Lindsay is a difficult one. In the last decade he’s been tucked away on Sky 1, US TV, the Gold channel or fantasy nonsense like Atlantis, appearing in dramas with neither personal pulling power nor a position in the listings I’d ever trip over by accident. In the previous decade it was a similar story, the actor’s CV inflated by a host of TV movies, documentary narration and voicing children’s programmes. However the body of work which I did experience is more than sufficient to elevate him to ‘treasure’ status.

While there have been films, the only one I recall watching was Divorcing Jack, and that was neither on the TV nor public cinema. Instead, as a BBC Northern Ireland co-production I was invited to a special screening in London with some work colleagues. I enjoyed it, not least because Robert Lindsay had a prominent role, albeit as a charismatic but duplicitous politician.

A few years earlier, in 1993, he was the undoubted main attraction at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in the title role of Cyrano de Bergerac. He was, of course, brilliant, combining a masterful comic touch and singing voice which brought the house down. He missed out on an Olivier Award but his mantelpiece must have been grateful for the temporary respite. After all, he has scooped major West End and Broadway honours for Me and My Girl, Oliver and Becket to name but three.

In the early Eighties, I must have seem him in the much-lauded BBC Shakespeare project productions of Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, although I have never been an aficionado of the classical theatre. I‘m not really a paid-up member of the more contemporary playwright fan club either. Each Stephen Poliakoff play may be a Television Event - with capital letters – but I tend to find them rather dense, despite typically stellar casts. Lindsay was amongst the ensemble of Friends and Crocodiles in 2006 and I managed to stick it out to the end.

I find Alan Bleasdale to be more accessible to viewers like myself, although it helps that I’m generally receptive to his often powerful political polemic and social comment. Bleasdale’s 1991 Channel 4 series GBH was extremely watchable, featuring Robert Lindsay as a hard left Labour council leader obviously based on Liverpool’s Derek Hatton. As was presumably the writer’s intention, my relationship with the character, Michael Murray, was a tortuous one. His socialist principles chimed positively but his clashes with Michael Palin’s popular headmaster were less appealing. As MI5 agents left him increasingly paranoid and wracked with guilt, Murray ultimately wins back our sympathy. GBH was political satire cloaked in a healthy dollop of dark humour and Lindsay was in his element. 

It was as another Red Flag-flying leftie Citizen Smith that the actor first made an impression on me, and millions of others, in the late Seventies. Looking back, you can observe elements of John Sullivan’s subsequent comedy creation Del-Boy in ‘Wolfie’ Smith and his more half-hearted suburban revolutionaries. Much of the humour came at the lead character’s expense which left me torn. It was funny, but I would dearly have loved him to have achieved his political ambition of ‘Freedom for Tooting’. His armed invasion of Parliament predictably came to an inept conclusion but there were more poignant scenes such as the one where Wolfie ponders his politics at the grave of Karl Marx. Perhaps because like me he’s left-leaning in real life, Lindsay made it heartfelt, compelling and quite emotional.

In 1983-4, he starred in Geoff McQueen’s BBC comedy-drama, Give Us a Break. It was Minder meets Pot Black, shamelessly trying to harness the popularity of snooker and engagingly dodgy wide boys. I loved it. The supporting cast included a ‘who’s who’ of actors who seemed to specialise in TV East End gangsters and light criminals, from Alan Ford and John Forgeham to Ron Pember and Joe Melia, and I expected it to run and run. Surprisingly it had only a single series. Perhaps Lindsay and young co-star Paul McGann proved too busy to commit to another; I don’t know.

Like most of my favourite actors, Robert Lindsay maintains an air of humanity and reality; he’s what I’d call ‘grounded’.  Not just in terms of politics but as a supporter of Derby County and other – ahem – charitable causes. Comedy has been his TV forte and I’ve always been attracted to the roles which have been imbued with both heart and soul. Nightingales (1990) was an acquired taste but the talents of Lindsay, James Ellis and David Threlfall were incapable of producing a laugh-free dud.

Perhaps his most famous twenty-first century character has been dentist Ben Harper in My Family. I confess to watching several episodes but I just couldn’t find him sympathetic at all. It ran for eleven seasons, so what do I know?! He also brought his light touch and gift for satire to the occasional host of Have I Got News For You. Forget ‘the people’, may there always be power to Robert Lindsay.