Above it all?

This weekend’s news includes an alarm being raised because one of Dominic Raab’s bodyguards left his gun on a plane. As so often, serious life-and-death matters are mixed up with mildly humorous, or at least entirely human, incidentals. I once left something on a plane, a lapse which only caused alarm to me (perhaps to me the pen is mightier than the sword?) - and it mattered not a bit in the long run.

I had been appearing in Northern Ireland when I got my first part in a radio play in London. I had to fly back from Belfast late one night and I had the radio job starting the next morning. In my hurry, I managed to leave my briefcase on the plane — with my radio script in it — and got it delivered back just in time to start rehearsing with it. I also had my last cigarette at this point, in the foyer at Broadcasting House. Probably the last place you could light up now. That was my final optional smoke, as it were. I have sometimes since had to smoke in plays. But not allowed to now.

When I arrived in the studio for that first broadcast I found myself alone with Cecil Parker who was playing the lead. He was quite a big name in his time, including playing the King in one of my favourite comedy films, “The Court Jester” with Danny Kaye. I had to introduce myself. I am not normally fazed by someone being better known than me (only actors, only people), but it is actually quite difficult to convey “You won’t know who I am, but I know who you are” without sounding a bit of a creep.

When I was a younger actor, I always seemed to be dashing between places, often Northern Ireland and the mainland. I always say I’ve never missed a performance, and that’s true in a sense, but there was once a show over there for which I was unavoidably (?) still up in the air — literally. Fortunately, the person I was taking over from was still with the production, and able to go on once more.

Before I first went to Belfast I knew nothing of the history of Ireland — that is, I knew what I’d been taught in school. I remember, and squirm, working with an actor called Joe in Bristol, and when he told me where in Ireland he came from I had to stop and think what I knew about the border to establish whether he was North or South. From 1969, when I was often backwards and forwards to N.Ireland, the modern Troubles built up. And then of course you felt impatient with people at home as culturally ignorant as I had been previously, who asked with incomprehension “Why are they making such a fuss about religion in-this-day-and-age?”