*
Alan McNaughtan
----------------------
Somebody said:
>: Golly! The man who played Sir Geoffrey Wellingham was SO good!
To which somebody else replied:
>Yeah, and I can't remember seeing him in anything else. ?
The role I most remember Alan McNaughtan in was the heavy-smoking, rather
embittered and lonely but very human schoolmaster Howarth in the 13-part
dramatization of Delderfield's "To serve them all my days", which dates from
somewhere in the early to mid 80s, I think. In fact he was so good in this
role that I've always had trouble seeing him as Wellingham.
*
Callan
--------
A propos of Callan, it seems to me that he is one of the last in the line of
fantasy adventurer-spies going as far back as Sexton Blake or Bulldog
Drummond, or more recently James Bond (who wouldn't have lasted 5 minutes as
a sandbagger) and The Saint. The progression leads on through "Danger Man",
"Man in a suitcase", "Callan", all of them very entertaining taken on their
own terms, but not very close to reality. My all time favourite in this
genre is Quiller, who as far as I know didn't make it to a TV series; even
though the later ones became so stereotyped that I could almost write them
myself I still have to read them at one sitting.
I think that, along with John le Carre's work (which was never a TV series),
Sandbaggers is a much more realistic portrayal of the system, and as such
belongs to an entirely different genre with a different aim.
I would love to see "Man in a suitcase" and "Callan" again. I suspect I
would now be disappointed by the former but not the latter.
*
Sherman and Sheldon
---------------------------
I noticed that my local public television station was rerunning
"Oppenheimer", starring Sam Waterston, whom I really like (but that's
irrelevant because he was not associated with SB). But pretty soon into the
series, there were both Bob Sherman as Lawrence (of the Lawrence Radiation
Labs) and Jana Sheldon as Oppy's wife. I noted with surprise that it was a
BBC production, so presumably that's how they got into it, and also that it
was made as long ago as 1980.
Growing up in England just after the war I remember that the same few
characters always used to turn up whenever Americans or Canadians were
needed on the radio, TV, movies or the stage. Robert Beatty (actually a
Canadian, I believe) comes to mind. Perhaps Bob Sherman is a later member
of this select bunch, the American living in Britain who gets plenty of work
doing American parts because there aren't too many suitable actors around.
A good idea too - Brits trying to do an American accent (or for that matter
Americans trying to do a British one) are usually embarrassingly awful.
I have a feeling that I have seen a much older Bob Sherman (with white hair)
in a recent production of something, but I've forgotten what it was. Does
anyone know what he's been doing lately?
*
Burnside as chef
---------------------
On the one occasion where Burnside is shown cooking, he appears to be able
to crack an egg and get it into the pan with one hand, something I've never
learned to do, and I'm considered a reasonable cook. So he seems to have
more experience than one would have expected from his lifestyle, at least at
frying eggs.
Tony Woodward
tony.woodward@nlc-bnc.ca