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PEOPLE’SCHOICE
John Thaw, BAFTA’s newest Fellow, has been a television ratings winner for more than a quarter of a century. Quentin Falk examines his enduring appeal.
to him.
“The first time I tried, standing in
the queue in the RADA canteen, all I got for my pains was a grunt, but some- thing about him made me persist and we soon became pals. He was only six- teen when he started at RADA (I was twenty one), though he looked older than I did, and his forbidding manner was just a cover-up for shyness.”
His tutors, said Courtenay, described Thaw as a “born, blissful, character actor”, an attribute he first tested out on stage professionally with the Liverpool Playhouse.
Then, just two years after he had a blink-and-you’ll-miss bit part in an early Courtenay screen triumph, The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner, Thaw was, at 24, starring in his own ITV series, Redcap, as rough, tough Sergeant John Mann, a uniformed military cop.
The series’ story editor was Ian Kennedy Martin who would later devise The Sweeney with Thaw in mind as the even rougher and tougher Detective Inspector Jack (“Get yer trousers on – yer nicked!”) Regan of the Flying Squad. The Sweeney did seven years hard on ITV through the mid 70s and into the 80s as well as spinning off into two successful feature-length ver- sions for the cinema.
The visceral Regan seemed barely to have faded from the public mind when the altogether more cerebral Inspector Morse, often as cryptic as his beloved crosswords, started Thaw on another, this time 13-year, ITV stretch in 1987, culminating in his dramatic demise one Remorseful Day.
“There’s more of me in Morse
than Regan,” Thaw remarked.
Ted Childs, Central TV’s then head of drama – and one of the programme’s executive producers – has written how it was Morse’s relationship with his partner, Lewis, that
“really drove the show,” with the junior adding “an air of grounded common sense” to the DI’s “high brow world of classics, crosswords and cask ale.”
So great was the rapport between the two actors in their respective per- sonas that Thaw was apparently moved to comment, with genuine regret, that it would be unlikely they could ever play alongside each other again.
Instant public identification with this latest in his long line of gruff law- men happily didn’t prevent Thaw from later accepting a host of very different roles, including the titular anti-hero of Kingsley Amis’s Stanley And The Women, the beleaguered Labour Party leader in David Hare’s Absence of War and, in a pair of Attenborough-directed films, Kruger in Cry Freedom and Fred Karno (of comic Army fame) in Chaplin.
A rare ratings – and critical - disas- ter for the normally Teflon-like TV star was the mini-series of Peter Mayle’s bestseller A Year In Provence. Naturally he bounced back a year later with the bespoke role of Kavanagh QC, the char- acter like Thaw from a working class Northern background.
The paucity of film parts down the years probably has much to do with the fact that Thaw – created a CBE in 1994 – claims to get bored hanging about on sets. And it’s a different kind of ennui that tells him when a long run needs to be finally curtailed.
“When I stop is the time I’m bored doing it – when I can’t give any more,” Thaw – currently starring in the ITV mini- series, The Glass – told Radio Five Live
listeners after his double BAFTA triumph.
According to veteran Guardian TV critic Nancy Banks-Smith, Thaw’s “forte is irritability rising to rage.” Odds are that the actor will be slow- burning to acclaim on the small screen for years to come. ■
Photo opposite page: John Thaw as Inspector Morse;
This page: Academy Fellowship and Lew Grade Award in hand
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