Tim McInnerny - the biggest, baddest forehead in the business

Tim McInnerny, like many actors, is on record as saying “It’s always nice to play a bastard”. This is just as well because in recent years the hard-hearted sod has been meat and drink to this Oxford-educated Cheshire lad. His distinctive piggy eyes deep set beneath an unfeasibly high forehead don’t scream ‘leading man’ but as a character actor par excellence he’s always in demand.

Despite this twenty-first century specialisation as unpleasant Establishment types, he is probably best known for portraying pompous, upper-class idiots in the Blackadder series. His debut was in the disappointing pre-Ben Elton medieval The Black Adder but with the rest of the cast, he hit his stride as the sycophantic Lord Percy Percy in Blackadder II. A few years later he switched personalities in Blackadder Goes Forth to play Captain Darling. The name was a comedy gift which kept on giving as his officious staff officer constantly found himself engaged in confusing conversations with his barmy boss (Stephen Fry) and unwinnable tussles with Rowan Atkinson’s cruel and bitter titular anti-hero. And yet, come the emotional finale, Darling becomes more human and sympathetic in the face of certain death as a result of going ‘over the top’ and he is present and correct for the climactic scene. 

The nomenclature followed him into subsequent one-off revivals like 1999’s Blackadder Back and Forth, notably in an amusing, albeit politically incorrect, Napoleonic scene stuffed full of French stereotyping like a factory of foie gras. That wasn’t it for Tim the comedy star. Casting aside his part in Westlife’s ‘Uptown Girl’ video (if only I could do the same for the Irish stool-perchers), he also appeared in a few Channel 4 Comic Strip mini-films broadcast in 1990. They were darker in tone than most, and not Peter Richardson’s finest works, but quite amusing nonetheless. In one, Tim was playing an inept hit-man and in Les Dogs played the groom’s father in a wedding reception which degenerated into a blood-soaked gun battle. I was wary of attending family do’s for years! In 2012 he was back in period costume as the starchy and mysterious Harmswell Grimstone in BBC2 Dickens spoof The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff, but by then he’d become a staple of yer proper drama. 

Indeed, McInnerny’s IMDB listing reads as What’s What of some of the best series I’ve watched in the past four decades. It seems faintly ludicrous that he should have played the boyfriend and suspected killer of Bob Peck’s daughter in the superb plutonium conspiracy thriller Edge of Darkness, but then 1985 was an awfully long time ago. That luminous expanse between eyebrows and hairline was already in evidence, though and it had almost completely taken over his head by the time Tim’s oily Ood slave owner merited one of the most gruesome transformations in the long history of Doctor Who, courtesy of what the character believed to be hair replacement medication. 

In between there were roles as an MI5 anti-Left conspirator in Channel 4’s A Very British Coup and as another arrogant and even more senior British Intelligence boss, with a very wayward moral compass, in early series of Spooks. As antagonist-in-chief to our hero Harry, Tim’s Oliver Mace was as nasty a bureaucratic creep you’d ever meet on screen, but he had rivals to the crown. In 2009 he was both a corrupt judge targeted by the Robin Hood-ish conmen in Hustle and a dodgy mill owner and politician in the sights of Inspector George Gently. Two years later he was a civil servant in the most-watched episode in the New Tricks canon and only last year the Tory government Chief Whip in The Trial of Christine Keeler. 

Before the onset of middle-age paunch, he portrayed a creep of a different sort in The Vice, as a porn film producer with a rarely-used London accent, a deranged new partner of the lead’s ex-wife in Lynda La Plante’s 2002 Trial and Retribution crime thriller and a seventeenth-century inventor in the star-studded adaptation of Longitude and in the past five years there have been many more roles in my kind of TV. From Sherlock to Strike, National Treasure (opposite Julie Walters) to the crazily bloodthirsty Gangs of London, McInnerny has been a sterling support.

We’ve only just finished seeing BBC One’s slow-burning often confusing eight-parter The Serpent, which featured Tim in a minor but important role as a world-weary Belgian consul in Bangkok. His Paul turned out to be a more three-dimensional character than most but I love it when the actor delivers the perfect turn as an imperious, oily Whitehall baddie. Nobody does it better!

Hugh Laurie - from upper-class twit to scheming baddie

As a fully-fledged adult, I have grown up with a wide range of talented entertainers of a similar age. Many emerged on television as part of an established duo or bunch of friends who cut their teeth as performers and writers on the university stage. For instance, Whitehouse and Enfield, French and Saunders, Mayall and Edmondson are long-standing household names for those of my generation. But few come posher than Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. 

Whilst Fry spent most of his public school adolescence getting expelled or imprisoned, Laurie followed the traditional upper-class passage of privilege from local ‘prep’ to Eton and finally Cambridge University. There, his educational achievements were suppressed by extracurricular activities but I reckon he’s come out of it all pretty well. Like Peter Cook, Eric Idle, Clive Anderson and various Goodies before him, young Hugh became President of Footlights where he and then partner Emma Thompson encountered a largely reformed Mr Fry, and the rest is history. 

Stephen could have sneaked into my list of TV Treasures but for sheer length and breadth of output I’ve leaned towards Laurie. In 1983, the two appeared with Thompson in Alfresco, ITV’s early toe dipped into the waters of what was to become known as alternative comedy. I watched a few instalments without being hugely impressed, unaware of the colossal careers most of those contributors would enjoy. They also included Robbie Coltrane and Ben Elton, the latter clearly falling short in the acting department in the collection of sketches! 

Instead he excelled at comedy writing and was partly responsible for The Young Ones, which I did watch. Religiously. He even wrote roles for himself and the old Footlights alumni in the classic episode ‘Bambi’. That included the University Challenge skit pitting ‘Scumbag College’ (Rick, Vyvyan, Neil and Mike) against the wealth-flaunting aristos of what else but ‘Footlights College’ featuring Laurie as ‘Lord Monty’.   

Lots of actors have over the years made upper-class twits their speciality. However, few have portrayed them with such childish and wide-eyed gusto as successfully as Hugh Laurie. The pinnacles of his aristocratic inanity were showcased in Ben Elton’s brilliant Blackadder canon of the late Eighties. As the foppish Prince Regent in Blackadder the Third, he propelled the simplicity dial to eleven but who could blame him for his bewildered befuddlement when faced with Samuel Johnson’s vocabularian verbosity?  Two years later, Blackadder Goes Forth saw his George as an upper-class WW1 officer, his stiff upper lip and cheery demeanour protecting him from the blatant horrors of the trenches. He was so stupid that he even allowed himself to cross-dress (as Georgina) and be wooed by Stephen Fry’s incompetent General Melchett. Rather successfully, it transpires…. 

That same year, the pair were reunited in the sketch show format for A Bit of Fry and Laurie. I felt it promised more than it delivered, but sometimes caught the zeitgeist, be it in the world of yuppie businessmen or coaching cheating footballers. I wonder if a young Neymar or Wilfred Zaha were in Hugh’s class? The football theme also cropped up in a 1991 Comic Relief news bulletin skit. Indeed, in the early days, he was a regular sight on Red Nose Day before other obligations took priority. 

At the start of the Nineties Hugh Laurie was extremely busy on TV, but he was also making a name in other entertainment media. There were various film roles, and one sweltering summer evening in 1990 I was with a group of friends watching his hilarious performance on the Theatre Royal stage in Gasping by – who else?- Ben Elton. Alongside Bernard Hill and Jaye Griffiths, he portrayed another upper-class twit in the yuppie satire but showed a gift for knockabout physical comedy too. He was clearly more than a mere sketch comedy phenomenon. 

I confess I can’t remember it, but my 1993 diary records my enjoying an ITV crime drama series All Or Nothing At All. Hugh starred as a feckless financial adviser, not with Emma Thompson but her mum Phyllida Law. Not a Fry in sight. The same was true when he appeared alongside Reeves and Mortimer in the 2000 reboot of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) in the guise of a shady doctor at a psychiatric retreat. Both parts suggested Hugh Laurie was shifting gear from posh, loveable prat to posh, devious crook. It suited him like a sleek, shiny Armani. 

In the first series of Spooks, he was back in upper-crust goodie mode, although of the rather more intelligent kind. Which is a relief because he was the amiable head of MI6. His character’s work with the CIA also heralded the actor’s migration to the USA for a new and unfeasibly lucrative phase. 

Apparently, so good was his accent that Hugh Laurie was considered a quintessential American when first auditioning for the role of Dr Gregory House. No matter. He got the gig and proceeded to star in House for eight long seasons, becoming in the process one of the highest paid stars on the US network. Who’d have thought it? Thankfully Channel 5 snapped up the UK broadcasting rights and I could take the opportunity to experience the Brit’s superb performance for myself. The character was a beguiling melange of eccentric pill-popping hospital specialist, irascible boss and frequently obnoxious human being. His saving grace was a Sherlock Holmes-ian brilliance when it came to spotting rare infectious diseases, albeit after a few near-fatal misdiagnoses, in each episode. With greying stubble and walking cane, this was a new-look Laurie, and he pulled off the difficult task of making such a walking contradiction both credible and charismatic. I persevered on and off for a few series before the format began to seem repetitive, and didn’t once see him on subsequent American hits Chance, Veep or Avenue 5. On the other hand I did witness his nice turn in 2019’s Catch-22 adaptation, including the funniest scene of the whole series. I was torn: it was reassuring that a Brit could succeed across the pond but a little disappointing that he needed to arm himself with transatlantic drawl to do so. 

It’s been evident for ages that Hugh Laurie is a real Renaissance man: not just a comedy writer/performer, cartoon voice artist and serious actor, but also Cambridge Blue at rowing (his dad won an Olympic gold in the same sport), novelist. passable guitarist, drummer and sax player, successful jazz-blues singer (but not my cup of Tetley’s) and accomplished pianist. In retrospect, his musical skills have slipped into quite a few comedy programmes over the years, from Comic Relief Country singer to tickling the ivories on Jeeves and Wooster. 

More recently he’s slipped back into the bodies of egotistical bastards, and has deserved all the plaudits. He was superior to any Bond baddie in 2016’s The Night Manager and an engaging duplicitous, ambitious Tory politician in 2020’s Roadkill. More Blackadder than Prince George, perhaps, but his Peter Laurence was another great Hugh Laurie character to be treasured.

Tony Robinson - A Little Man with a Plan

From roguish winner Patrick Mower to an impish loser who nonetheless had the last laugh and became a knight of the realm: arise, Sir Tony Robinson! Here in 2020 he must be one of the most prolific presenters of TV history or travel around. Barely a week goes by without my spotting in the listings a programme in which he walks, flies, floats, takes to the tracks or time machine for Channels 4 or 5. I feel guilty at not watching more of them.

Trouble is, the genre has become so congested that series tend to blend into each other. What looks to be a repeat or re-hash may actually be a genuinely novel look at a familiar subject – or vice-versa. Surely while filming on location Tony must bump into other household names doing a similar thing. On a train threading the Andes, say ‘Hi’ to Michael Portillo; trudging across a World War 1 battlefield, bid a cheery wave to Dan Snow or Ian Hislop; delve into the Romans and expect to grapple for the best angles with Bettany Hughes or Michael Wood; dip into the costume box for a Tudor smock and sandals only to look up to find Lucy Worsley lording it in velvet, lace and tiara. And so on.

It wasn’t always thus. It’s easy to forget Tony Robinson is an actor by profession. I’m too old to have seen him on Play Away and minor film roles also passed me by. Then in the Eighties came two series in which his characters inhabited the past, or at least a comically warped version of it, and the rest is – er – history.

In 1983 I recall being distinctly underwhelmed by The Black Adder. Fresh from Not The Nine o’Clock News success, Rowan Atkinson co-wrote this 1485-set sitcom with Richard Curtis with himself in the title role, Peter Cook as Richard III and the little-known Tony Robinson as his servant Baldrick. All the ingredients promised much hilarity but delivered few laughs. Like many others, I gave up after one or two episodes. Thank goodness Ben Elton came on board for Blackadder II which aired in ’86. The lead character became more arrogant and less stupid, while Baldrick’s IQ took a nosedive.

With a supporting cast of Miranda Richardson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Rik Mayall, Tim McInnerny et al, the series went from strength to strength. My personal favourite is Blackadder the Third but of course the concluding Blackadder Goes Forth featured the jaw-dropping ‘over-the-top’ slo-mo scene fading to a field of poppies, reminding us that for all the brilliant humour the brutal reality of the trenches was that millions were slaughtered. All the while, the exchanges between Edmund and Baldrick served up piles of comedy gold, the highlights being the latter’s ‘cunning plans’, forever doomed to fail.

Also at the tail end of the Eighties Robinson was moved to write his own historical comedy series Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, cleverly subverting the over-familiar Robin Hood legend. Ostensibly a children’s show I didn’t dream of watching it. In any case I was probably still at work when it was broadcast. However, it gained in popularity and I was eventually tempted to tune in and see what all the fuss was about. I became hooked, the video henceforth set to record whenever I remembered. Like The Simpsons, Maid Marian was one of those shows wasted on kids! Just for a change, Robinson swapped peasant attire for the Sheriff’s garb but he was as daft as the rest of them, inevitably outwitted by Kate Lonergan’s Marian. I came to the series far too late; I feel a boxset-style YouTube binge approaching pronto.

Since then, Tony Robinson has become closely associated with history documentaries or features. However, the Baldrick connection and left-leaning politics have combined to focus not on kings and generals but the ordinary souls affected by the Establishment through the years. For example I occasionally caught an episode of Worst Jobs in History.  His latest is The History of Britain, again from the perspective of Mr and Mrs Ordinary. In my opinion, one of the most fascinating historical docs of recent times was his Great Rising of 1381. Shown in 2004, it was a full-blown re-telling of the Peasants Revolt, complete with familiar Brentwood locations. Robinson was a compelling and enthusiastic presenter par excellence, revelling in the story of the little man rising up against an oppressive regime. Of course, Wat Tyler’s cunning plan failed – but it was a close run thing.

For almost twenty years Tony’s historical era of focus varied from week to week. With his hosting skills the nation fell in love with a subject notoriously difficult to get across on telly: archaeology. Until 1994, my appetite for the subject was rarely satisfied. Every now and again there would be an edition of BBC2’s Chronicle or Timewatch featuring a dig but Channel 4’s Time Team refreshed the subject for the next generation – and me. When I used to visit Mum and Dad on Sunday afternoons, the programme became a regular part of our teatimes and I would often tune in at home in subsequent years, albeit with decreasing frequency.

It’s interesting to revisit Time Team now and track the length of his hair! In the early days it gave him the appropriate air of a greasy hippy  but, as this 1997 Time Team Live from Gloucestershire shows, the lank locks were tamed. Come the 2000s, what hair remained was going grey. Well, it happens to us all…

But Time Team wasn’t just about Tony Robinson. The three-day time limit was necessarily contrived but I learned a hell of a lot not only about British history but the specialist elements of archaeology itself, from basic trowel work but also the importance of geophysics scans, aerial photography and computer graphics. Aided by Mick Aston’s colourful jumpers, Phil Harding’s wonderfully rustic Wiltshire accent and the welcome feminine touch of Carenza Lewis, each week we would be guided through a frantic dig in the hope of finding answers to questions about the sites of, say, an Iron Age bridge, Roman settlement or Elizabethan manor house. While the professionals did their stuff, Robinson was effectively the viewer’s eyes and ears, scampering through mud from trench to trench with puppy-like enthusiasm to inspect the latest discovery of a coin, piece of masonry or, if their luck was really in, a section of mosaic.

It was science as entertainment, with a healthy dollop of open countryside as a bonus, even if the weather was often dreadful. Actually, some of the locations were more urban examining, for instance, medieval streets in York or Much Wenlock. I nursed a cruel preference for the weeks when the team was allowed to excavate pristine lawns of a stately home, imagining the expressions of the owners upon observing the carnage on returning from their brief sojourn in Chamonix or Antigua.

To an academic, every site was a potential goldmine of information but to viewers like me, the law of diminishing returns set in. One line of stones or fragment of urn looks very much like another and, despite the passion and zeal of the Time Team, I found it harder to maintain the desire to make that appointment to view on Sunday evenings. Nevertheless Tony Robinson had made his lasting mark yet again.

He also appeals to me as a fellow socialist and campaigner for causes close to my own heart like Make Poverty History or the doomed bid to prevent Brexit. I also revel in the knowledge that Baldrick was knighted while the right-wing Blackadder himself (well, Rowan Atkinson) remains at the time of writing, a mere CBE. The outdated honours system may be an irritating anachronism but it’s somehow reassuring that the little man, be it in lower or upper case, can once in a while get the upper hand.

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.