If only he was him in that
It’s a bit difficult, sometimes, separating a character you see on the television from the role you first saw them in that glues them indelibly into your memories. It’s not so much that they are typecast but for me little Raymond Callitri (Gone in 60 seconds) is dying to burst through into Christopher Ecclestone’s Dr Who. To the extent that I yearn to see (and imagine fiercely in the dark recesses of my mind) the angry Doctor confronting the belligerent dalek in, er, the episode called ‘Dalek’ and Callitri bursting through the time lord persona to demand of the monocular menace ‘Am I an arsehole? DO I LOOK LIKE AN ARSEHOLE?’
This is happening again right now with Douglas Henshall, acting as a dour, emotionally fractured soul-tortured detective Jimmy Perez in Shetland. My first exposure to him (and a certain Ewan MacGregor) was in the TV production of Dennis Potter’s story of Lipstick On Your Collar was as his role as Corporal Berry, a sadistic sexist shitbag of a human being, who nevertheless in his tiny minded petty power trip did still get some pretty choice deadpan comedic lines to exhort into his victims’ lugholes. Now watching him as Perez, I would give anything for him to lean across the interrogation room table and threaten the accused, Berry-like, that he would stick his Corporal’s Private into the man’s ear and SHAG SOME SENSE INTO HIM.
Of course we have the Blesseds, Connerys and Cages for whomever they go to mirror in the multiplicitous masks of theatrical ghosts, are always basically playing themselves with only the finest 0.8 micron veneer of character. A façade worn like a shiny but thinly transparent soap bubble overcoat. Their uncompromising sense of inner selves will not be muted. Something we come to expect and now would find alien and uncomfortable were the expected to become suddenly unexpected.
With this in mind I just need to rub my lucky red shorts and wish for a performance where Hugh Laurie is playing misanthropic pain meds-addicted clinical diagnostician House MD and reaches a breakthrough conclusion on an impossible case with the gnomic utterance “Lupus. Because My head, oh my head. It feels like the time I was initiated into the Silly Buggers society at Cambridge. I misheard the rules and tried to push a whole aubergine up my earhole.”
