Gina McKee - Ice Cool on Wearside

For an actor whose performances have graced the small screen so consistently for so long, Gina McKee could be forgiven for wondering why this fan has witnessed so few of them. Guilty as charged. I feel negligent, a fraud. However, she shouldn’t be too downhearted because Ms McKee has nonetheless entered my personal pantheon of TV Treasures. She has made her name in serious drama. That elegant, ‘long’ face and cool, near-glacial expression have secured a fair few costume drama roles such as The Forsyte Saga and The Borgias but they’re simply not my cup of tea. 

Yet bizarrely it was in a comedy that Gina McKee first came to my attention. Back in 1987 The Lenny Henry Show shone the spotlight on to the comedian’s one-time sketch character Delbert Wilkins. Much of the humour was drawn from Delbert squeezing his larger-than-life personality into the confines of a small-time Brixton pirate radio station. For the six-part series, a supporting cast had to be introduced, straight men and women to Lenny’s scene-stealing star. Gina was the straightest of them all, the sole voice of sanity who started out as a café waitress before becoming the radio station’s receptionist when the ‘Brixton Broadcasting Company’ went legit.

She also dead-panned it during Channel 4’s Drop The Dead Donkey and as a regular reporter on Chris Morris’ more barmpot news satire Brass Eye. By this time McKee had taken a giant leap towards stardom thanks to her part in BBC2’s Our Friends in the North. I’ve already raved about Christopher Eccleston in this series but, as the only female lead, she was outstanding, in more ways than one. 

In the rollercoaster saga of North-Eastern politics and relationships, I remember willing Eccleston’s Nicky and McKee’s Mary to get back together at the end. Amidst the thrilling and emotional ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ finale it would seem that I was to get my wish, although it was to the production’s considerable credit that not all loose ends were tied up in silk red ribbons and bows. If only more drama series were brave enough to do the same.

With a death toll of around a quarter of a million, there were a lot of tragic endings following the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. The natural disaster was still raw when HBO made its Tsunami-The Aftermath in 2006. There’d been a fair few documentaries, including tourists’ own video footage, but this was only a film ‘inspired by real-life events’. I say ‘only’ but the Thai locations lent a real authenticity to proceedings. Special effects and a top-notch cast did the rest. There was no opportunity for Gina McKee to glam up for this one; it wasn’t a role for aqua-phobes! She was excellent, of course, as a mum separated from part of her family by the devastating tidal wave but unusually she was passed over for the major awards. With the likes of Toni Collette and Chiwetel Ejiofor leading a heavyweight cast, acting accolades were distributed more widely but it was a gripping two-parter when shown on BBC2.

I have also watched Gina in programmes such as Waking The Dead and heard her narrate the football documentary series Premier Passions, focussing on the fortunes of her local club Sunderland FC but in recent times, her most memorable performance came in 2018’s Bodyguard. While Keeley Hawes and Richard Madden stole the plaudits, she provided some ballast as the anti-terrorist chief caught up in political intrigue. But would she prove to be the baddie? We had to wait for the nerve-shredding if rather incredible climax to find out!

Provided the world ever recovers from the coronavirus impact on the global economy, there is talk of her reprising her role in a follow-up. Poor Jed Mercurio will have to juggle writing duties on all his ratings blockbusters but I’m sure it will be worth waiting for.

Gina McKee isn’t the only actress from the North-East, of course. Liz Carling, Jill Halfpenny and even Donna Air and Denise Welch have kept the flag flying for the Wear, Tees and Tyne but McKee seems to have escaped the ‘Geordie’ typecasting. She’s acting royalty now, don’t y’know, pet?

Derek Martin - The London Cabbie for all ages

For many years, Derek Martin was an easily forgotten name, but the same could not be said of his face or voice. He wasn’t quite in the Ray Winstone/Alan Ford league as a Cockney ‘heavy’ but as a genuine East Londoner with a stint at Smithfield market on his CV his Cockney credentials earned him lots of TV work. So often, In Seventies cop shows I watched, like Softly Softly and Dixon of Dock Green, he’d be a common-or-garden Len, Ted or Dick. As a van, lorry or taxi driver. he possessed  the authenticity of a Londoner behind the wheel.

For me, Derek’s relative anonymity was blown apart when in his late sixties he established himself in the cast of Eastenders, but his overnight celebrity took more than four decades to happen. In the early Seventies I must have seen him in the family business drama The Brothers (as ‘van driver’, surprise surprise) and the quirky children’s sci-fi serial Man Dog. Sadly I couldn’t find a clip of the latter but it made a substantial impression on me, helped by its familiar Southampton locations.

Later in the decade he became a familiar figure in ITV crime capers, invariably on the wrong side of the law. In an episode of The Sweeney, he even managed to out-run Dennis Waterman’s Carter, but I daresay he was nicked by the closing credits. That same year, he played another villain in The Professionals, and then a ‘heavy’ up against Waterman again in Minder.

Derek Martin wasn’t always one of the bad guys. He upheld the forces of law and order, albeit under the radar, in programmes like Z Cars and even Terry and June, but it was in The Chinese Detective that he really made his mark. At that time (1981-2), this was quite a ground-breaking series, providing a rare starring role for an ‘ethnic minority’ actor. I loved David Yip in that show, portraying the mild-mannered but slightly unorthodox (is there any other kind of cop on TV?) John Ho, clashing not only with criminals but also his boss DCI Berwick, played by Derek Martin. He was old-school Londoner, and displayed the sort of casual racism that pervaded much of the police in those days. In my mind’s eye I can still see him shouting “’O, ‘O” at his sergeant! I think there grew a grudging mutual respect between the two by the end, but it ran for only two series.

In the Nineties, I watched some of ITV’s Lynda la Plante prison drama The Governor, in which Derek played Janet McTeer’s deputy but I missed out on one of his largest roles, in King and Castle. However, it is as a regular cast member of a couple of soaps that he has become part of my TV furniture.

Back in ’93, he joined the Beeb’s ill-fated foray into international drama, Eldorado. Located in an expat community on the Costa del Sol, it carried a great deal of investment, financial and professional. As a BBC employee, I fervently wished for success but it was doomed from the first creaking instalment which, somewhat improbably, I watched from a Channel ferry. In hindsight, box-ticking took priority over plotlines, and the European eye-candy failed to attract the younger audiences. A few of them could barely act. The hostile anti-Beeb press finished the job. Removing the dead wood and bringing in some sterling British character actors did help but the plug was pulled after a single year. As Alex Morris Derek Martin appeared in forty episodes, including the very last but, to be honest, all I can remember was ‘Mucky Marcus’ escaping from an exploding car. 

In comparison I have a clear memory of his arrival in Albert Square as Charlie Slater and his dysfunctional family of females. That was 2000, and in all he went on to make nearly 800 episodes of Eastenders. Apparently Derek had been considered for both Dirty Den and Frank Butcher (there’s a thought!) but as East End cabbie Charlie, he must have been a shoo-in for the casting team. At first he had some meaty storylines, even becoming involved in some fisticuffs, but it was for his verbal clashes with mother-in-law Big Mo (Laila Morse) that he is best remembered by me.

The character also brought him a few related TV roles, be they in Eastenders spin-offs or as cameos in comedies such as Little Britain. In my opinion he made a splendid straight man to Matt Lucas’ grotesque Fatfighters leader Marjory. But then that has always been Derek Martin’s strength. For fifty years he’s been one of our most dependable supporting actors on the box. I’ll never know how he might have fared battling with Angie Watts or wooing Pat Butcher wearing nowt but a rotating bow tie but, now well into his eighties, I reckon Derek Martin has done enough to enter my role call of Treasures.

John Alderton - Kng of Light Comedy

My collection of TV Treasures features several faces from Seventies situation comedy but in the first half of that decade, John Alderton was the king of the genre. Usually paired with his real-life wife Pauline Collins, he was one of the most recognisable faces on both BBC and ITV. Richard Briers, Ronnie Barker, Mollie Sugden, Diane Keen and Richard O’Sullivan were also pretty ubiquitous but I’d like to celebrate the humble man from Humberside.

My first recollection of the actor dates from my junior schooldays, Please Sir!. We didn’t watch much ITV so it’s not a giant leap of imagination to surmise why Mum and Dad shared the series with two young children.. As teachers, they probably watched with a mix of sympathy with the newly-qualified Mr Hedges, played by Alderton, and relief that their own classes could not possibly be worse than Fenn Street Secondary Modern’s 5C. However, it was hardly A Clockwork Orange. Penned by Esmonde and Larbey, who’d later create The Good Life, it was pretty tame stuff. The fact that the pupils appeared considerably older than 16 was presumably lost on me, but it did nothing to allay fears about future life in ‘Big School’!  I reckon I felt sorry for the hapless but well-intentioned classroom ingénue but, for all the pupils’ cheek, the comedy was mercifully redeemed by a measure of mutual respect; that and the classic theme tune.

After reprising his role in the inevitable cinema spin-off, Alderton left mid-term. He soon showed up again on the Beeb in My Wife Next Door. This proved extremely popular on Tuesday evenings and made the name of co-star Hannah Gordon. In fact it was she, not Alderton, who achieved the ultimate accolade of a guest role in the Morecambe and Wise Christmas show in their heyday No disrespect intended to Hannah but Alderton would have been a brilliant performer in one of the plays wot Ernie wrote. Perhaps he was considered too lightweight? Whatever, it didn’t seem to harm his own career, although My Wife…ran for only one season. It was another smoothly ‘safe’ comedy and its humour also appealed to millions of viewers when repeated in 1979.

He was back in single-series sitcom suburbia for No Honestly, this time without Hannah Gordon but in the company of real-life spouse Pauline Collins. My 1974 diary faithfully records I watched it but I have no mental recollection other than Lynsey de Paul’s hit theme tune..

They were also concurrently in harness for ITV’s Upstairs Downstairs, she as a maid, he as the chauffeur. This saga of aristocrats and their servants in early twentieth century London was a staple of our household’s weekend evening viewing for five years and even I became swept along by the storylines. It was hardly a comedy but along with Mr Hudson, Mrs Bridges, Rose et al, the characters portrayed by Alderton and Collins were extremely popular before leaving service after two series. The parent series ended in 1975, but the pair were reunited in 1978 to reprise their roles, in Thomas and Sarah. Now a sixth-former with different tastes in television, I watched with little enthusiasm. It was, after all, more to Mum’s taste than mine but I expect that the lure of John Alderton was too strong to resist.

He seemed to specialise in tall, gawky and socially awkward characters, and none fitted the blueprint better than Mr Mulliner who in various guises cropped up in many stories by PG Wodehouse broadcast on the BBC in the late 1970s. I have much fonder and clearer memories of the delightful Wodehouse Playhouse despite it inhabiting the rather twee and antiquated world of the Twenties English upper-crust. I was even moved aged 15 to describe it as “sheer brilliance”, praise indeed. The first two series also featured – surprise surprise! – Ms Collins in a variety of roles opposite the star Alderton but she had left by the ’78  season which opened with The Smile That Wins. I even tried to copy that smile. Not in any misguided hope of romantic conquest I should add. I’d have needed advice on more than how to grin.

In the Eighties and Nineties, John Alderton was mostly lost to TV, and Pauline found movie fame as Shirley Valentine. One exception was Channel 4’s Father’s Day in 1984 which for reasons long since lost in time really appealed to me. Unfortunately I can find no clips on YouTube, unlike Forever Green which I never actually saw.

Enter the new millennium and Alderton began to creep back into my consciousness, guesting in the occasional drama. He was in a 2001 Dalziel and Pascoe mystery then a few years later in the first series of Doc Martin as a silver-bearded sailor. My interest in Clunes, Catz and the Cornish scenery didn’t extend into subsequent series but it was an unexpected pleasure to see this particular TV Treasure putt-putting in a dinghy across sun-kissed waters and into the Doc’s surgery. Forty years earlier it would surely have been John Alderton in the Martin Clunes role. Time has not been kind to the former’s ‘70s comedy creations but he remains a peerless and ageless actor with an easy charm and feather-light touch.

Michael Rodd - Legend of Yesterday's World

He may not have been the Beeb’s biggest name in science-based features but for youngsters like me, Michael Rodd was definitely one of the most popular presenters during the 1970s. I’m not sure when I first saw him on the box. His two main programmes ran concurrently pretty much throughout the Seventies. However, it was probably his role as a non-science children’s TV host which first caught my attention. Particularly in the first half of that decade I was a regular viewer of the BBC’s weekday children’s output, although onerous secondary school homework assignments would intervene with increasing frequency.

From Blue Peter to drama serials, Newsround to Rentaghost, Catherine and I would lap it up. Presenters like Johnny Morris (Animal Magic), Tony Hart (Vision On), Roy Castle (Record Breakers) and Johnny Ball (Cabbages and Kings) were always welcome guests in our living room. I’ve mentioned previously that we were entertained by Bernard Cribbins’ acting game show Star Turn but for sheer longevity our fave quiz was undoubtedly Screen Test.

I’ve no idea whether or not I was present for the inaugural edition in 1970 but once I began noting my viewing in a diary from 1973, Screen Test was clearly a regular. It was an inter-town rather than schools competition, although that may have amounted to the same thing. I don’t remember Billericay being represented. Certainly nobody asked me! It wasn’t even a quiz. You didn’t need to be an expert on TV or films, just adept at observation and memory. Participants were questioned on clips from TV programmes or, as far as I can recall, Children’s Film Foundation shorts so any of us could at least join in at home. I was pretty rubbish but enjoyed the show nonetheless. Michael Rodd was a very affable, chirpy host, a million miles from the more staid Geoffrey Wheeler or Robert Robinson, and we loved him for it.

Rodd brought the same personality to his other broadcasting gig, Tomorrow’s World. He would have overlapped with my other science-focussed TV Treasure James Burke but for me it was the years with Rodd and Judith Hann I remember most fondly. Children like me could hardly engage with Fifties throwback Raymond Baxter who would introduce programmes up to 1977 while perched on a stool like some prototype member of Geriatric Westlife. However, Rodd was a master of the filmed report (like the above amusing look at a brilliant new driver’s companion – cassnav?) as well as the live studio demonstration of the latest gadgets which would surely rule our lives in the future. Some did, many didn’t, but it didn’t really matter at the time.

Back then I was unaware of Michael’s credentials as a musician. Indeed it was how he first became noticed on regional news. It explains why he didn’t flinch from any feature involving music, be it singing, playing guitar - or both. It was also Mr Rodd who brought our attention to a prototype mobile phone in 1979 and the ill-fated laser disc a year later. Whereas it had once been caught only by turning on early for Top of the Pops, Rodd-era Tomorrow’s World had become well worth watching in its entirety and on its own merit.

Michael Rodd was also on hand to present the TW spin-off The Risk Business. In the late ‘70s my A level Economics course had inspired me to read around the subject, prompting me to watch some of these late evening programmes, each of which focussed on a single topic, such as toy manufacturing or closing the skills gap. The only edition I definitely remember was the one in 1979 featuring then British Rail chairman Sir Peter Parker but then the subject was close to my heart, Still didn’t achieve an ‘A’…..

It was while at university that NASA launched its inaugural Space Shuttle flight in April 1981. With the Apollo missions a distant memory, this was a noteworthy event. However, instead of the old guard of James Burke and Patrick Moore, the Beeb’s live coverage was led in the studio by Michael Rodd, with fellow TW host Kieran Prendiville out in the States. I don’t remember seeing the rocket take off but the landing two days later was unmissable and unforgettable. Seeing that aircraft emerge from space unscathed was a genuinely moving moment for viewers like me, and it was good old Michael in charge of the coverage.

Only a few years later, Michael Rodd disappeared from national TV to focus on running his own independent production company which I believe was very successful in the field. He’s missed on screen, though. But what about his voice? Apparently Steve Coogan based the delivery and intonation of Alan Partridge on Michael, which I find hard to believe. The latter always sounded far more bright and bouncy than the over-earnest egotistical fictional creation. Don’t get me wrong; Partridge is a work of comedy genius but Michael Rodd was the real deal.

Keeley Hawes - Lady, spook and dodgy cop

If Christopher Eccleston ranks as one of the most compelling TV male actors, then Keeley Hawes must be right up there in the Premier league of females. More than that, I’d pay good money to see her meet Mr Eccleston in the TV drama Champions League final.   She’s a true chameleon of her craft. I know she’s an actor, and that’s part of the job, but she has such an incredible range, whether as sultry siren, power-dressing politician, haughty aristocrat or dowdy detective.

Keeley Hawes made her name in adaptations of literary classics, and it’s a name redolent of posh young aristocrats in corsets and bonnets, complete with a peerless speaking voice. As I may have mentioned before, costume drama ain’t my bag, but I made an exception in 2010, dipping a tentative toe into the water of BBC1’s reboot of Upstairs, Downstairs. Her character was, of course, firmly in the ‘Upstairs’ camp (Lady Agnes, no less) but sadly even she couldn’t save it from the axe after season two, leaving ITV’s Downton Abbey clear of competition. As for costume drama, I’m not sure whether the 1960s count but it was pleasing to find Hawes opening the door to Mrs Wilson in the 2018 serial of that name. She would have been a nailed-on favourite for the title role had the eponymous Mrs W not been the grandmother of actor Ruth Wilson. Fair enough!

I probably first noted Keeley in the early Noughties, appearing in the closing mystery of the Murder in Mind anthology series, but it was in Spooks that she made her first real impression on me. As MI5 agent Zoe Reynolds she was in this consistently excellent series right from its 2002 launch. Hers was a key character before being written out in the third series. Unlike several members of the team, she did at least avoid leaving the Service in a body bag. Her love interest had been played by Richard Harrington but, in real life, Hawes left the show with a different new husband, fellow ex-Spook Matthew MacFadyen. 

Four years later she added the sci-fi fraternity to her fanbase. Starring in Ashes to Ashes, her DI Alex “Bolly-Knickers” Drake found herself back in 1981, at first clashing with, then becoming closer to the splendidly unreconstructedly macho Quattro-driving Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister). Personally I didn’t find it as compelling as its predecessor Life On Mars, and the time-swap storyline was somewhat baffling, but naturally Keeley was great in it, holding her own against Glenister’s crowd-pleasing turn, which can’t have been easy.

She was another plain-clothed detective in ITV’s Identity in 2010, this time heading up an elite unit in the present-day. However, I watched only the opening episode. Judging by the ratings and reviews I wasn’t the only viewer to give episode two the ‘heave-ho’ but maybe I wasn’t in the same mood for crime drama back then.

It wasn’t all socialites and kick-ass security forces; there have been charming comedy roles, too. In The Vicar of Dibley’s climactic Christmas two-parter, Keeley played the glamorous woman embracing Dawn French’s fiancé Richard Armitage, getting the Rev all hot under the dog collar. Being a Richard Curtis comedy, of course, she turned out to be his sister and everyone lived happily ever after. Ahhhh.

A few years hence and she guested in a sketch on That Mitchell and Webb Look, a BBC2 show greatly under-rated in my view.  In a typically surreal scene, she actually played herself, a disbelieving David Mitchell’s dream wife. And can you blame him? Sadly for David it proved to be just that, a dream. In 2013, however, he had actually married her, albeit only in Ambassadors.  There was more tongue-in-cheek casting with Keeley’s real-life hubby Matthew MacFadyen in the Foreign Office. It was a mildly amusing comedy-drama but failed to elicit a re-commission.

I can’t say I’ve watched her star in a comedy series, but in 2017 Hawes shared equal billing in one of the funnier Inside No.9 vignettes written by Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton. Playing the level-headed wife to Shearsmith’s abandoned shoe obsessive, it was an enjoyable half-hour in an always-quirky but rather hit-and-miss franchise. I’m willing to bet she also enjoyed her part as a 2014 Doctor Who villain opposite Peter Capaldi in ‘Time Heist’. I know I did.

In the subsequent years, Keeley Hawes has really charged into the upper echelons of British TV royalty. I willingly gave The Durrells a miss although. Having read JK Rowling’s book, I would have liked to try the BBC production of The Casual Vacancy. There was no chance whatever of ignoring the second series of The Missing. Penned by brothers Jack and Harry Williams, the first one had been a riveting thriller, introducing the engaging character of Julien Baptiste (Tcheky Karyo). In 2017, the retired French detective was back in mainland Europe for The Missing 2 to investigate another missing girl, the daughter of our Keeley and her dodgy army Captain husband David Morrissey. For all their star quality, it was Karyo’s Baptiste who dominated the screen and thoroughly deserved his own, Amsterdam-set series last year. I hope there’ll be more, especially in this miserable xenophobic post-Brexit age.

But back to Ms Hawes…. A couple of years ago she made the headlines again when, in what proved to be a Sunday night ratings blockbuster, her character came to such an unexpectedly premature and gruesome end that newspapers couldn’t accept she had actually died. Conspiracy theories abound. Hang on, it’s only fiction! I’m talking about Jed Mercurio’s The Bodyguard, and Keeley’s portrayal as the Home Secretary who falls for her lantern-jawed police minder, played by Richard Madden. It was a compelling series, perhaps let down by the implausible concluding episode, but for all the powerful acting it was impossible for me to imagine Amber Rudd, her real-life counterpart at the time of recording, ever seducing her bodyguard. As for her predecessor Teresa May, the very thought makes me vomit!

For all these memorable performances, none have quite matched Hawes’ Lindsay Denton in another Mercurio creation, Line of Duty.  In recent years, the series has consistently set the standard for crime drama and much of the credit must go to the calibre of the cast. Each series involves an investigation of a possible bent cop, and in a roll-call of top-notch actors like Lennie James and Stephen Graham, Keeley topped the lot.

To start with, it was bizarre seeing her as a miserable, dowdy detective shorn of the make-up and hair-styling which I’d normally associate with her characters. As a viewer I would be flung by tortuous plot twists hither and thither in finding her innocent or guilty. Hawes was mesmerising as a complex and vulnerable cop caught up in a conspiracy, but how complicit was she? DI Renton actually made it into a second series but she displayed a degree of redemption in her shocking final scene, bringing the audience with her to the bitter, bloody end.

Talk about leaving the viewer wanting more! Whether her name is above or below the title, I look forward to the next Keeley Hawes vehicle. It’s bound to be a fast, bumpy but enjoyable ride.