A Career Tragically Lost to Time

Okay, somebody help me out here because this has been driving me crazy for weeks now. I’m trying to remember the name of this actor from the 80s. HE was a character guy and he used to be in EVERYTHING but he never shows up anymore. He was one of those imperious Royal Shakespeare Company guys like Patrick Stewart but one of the really stark looking ones. He used to play Villains in like, EVERYTHING.

The first time I remember seeing him was in one of those old 7th Doctor serials when the show was really going off the rails. I thought it was the Happiness patrol. I was pretty sure of it actually but I got the DVD they put out recently and I think they switched to a different cut or something because there’s somebody different playing Trevor Sigma.

Of course, now that I’m trying to remember his name every movie I thought he was in turns out to star somebody else so it’s starting to feel a little like somebody’s mocking me. Maybe I’m just going crazy or something.

I was hoping to write up a thing like that AVClub article about Jim Beaver but about this dude. I obviously can't do that when I can’t even remember the guy’s name though. My friend was trying to help me out with this but he's been a bit tied up trying to find a missing friend of his. If anybody has any clue who I’m talking about I’d really love it. Even if you just remember a movie you saw him in once or something let me know down in the comments section.

Okay I need somebody to help me here because I genuinely feel like I’m starting to go crazy or something. I NEED to know the name of this one actor that just isn’t showing up on a Google search no matter what I do. Have you guys ever seen the old 1960’s BBC version of Caves of Steel? Youtube says this is all that survives of it but I could SWEAR I saw it on like PBS when I was little and there’s like no record of any of the secondary actors. And this was some guy that was playing one of the other robots at the station or something.

I know that’s a deep pull but it’s kinda the best I can do. Every time I try and find something else I was sure the guy was in it turns out it’s like a young Patrick Stewart or something and I was just totally blanking. The whole thing doesn’t actually make any sense. Like I totally remember him being a BIG DEAL in England when I was a kid, like Ian McKellan big but there’s just nothing on the guy anywhere.

And PLEASE don’t tell me I’m just thinking of Ian McKellan or something because I’m SURE it was a different guy. Yes he totally came up in that generation of RSC guys and everything but he wasn’t Patrick Stewart or Ian McKellan.

I’m really hoping somebody can just jog my memory of his name or something because I think the fact this guy’s been virtually forgotten is such a shame. I had a friend helping me out with this but he's had to switch gears and look for a missing friend (which I'll totally admit is much more important than this petty blog post). Be sure to let me know in the comments if you’ve even got a hunch on who I’m talking about.

All the recent talk about the discovery of a few scattered episodes of Doctor Who has gotten me thinking about how much we’ve lost not just from Doctor Who but from basically two entire decades of BBC history. I mean just look at Caves of Steel, a full adaptation of an Isaac Asimov done in the 1960s. A buddy cop show with a robot and freaky retro-futuristic garb. It’s Almost Human half a century early and all we’ve got of it is a minute and a half of scattered video clips.

But it isn’t just the coolness factor that makes me mourn for these shows it’s virtually an entire generation of writers, performers and technicians whose work has been forgotten to history. For the last six months I’ve been trying to track down the details of an actor who worked regularly in BBC genre shows like Caves of Steel through most of the 60s but who has now been so thoroughly lost to history I can’t even find a record of his name online.

We often think that the internet has made it possible to find any detail of anything with minimal effort but that’s only true with files and records that have been digitized so the regular purges of the BBC tape archives during the 60s and 70s along with the general lack of interest in digitizing most of their paper archives have lead to huge gaps in our knowledge of who worked on what when.

So here’s an actor who I can remember seeing in everything from Caves of Steel, to early Doctor Who to BBC Shakespeare performances to Quartermass serials and now there’s nothing on the guy anywhere. So now I’m turning to other TV fans who may have watched these kinds of shows when they were young. If you can remember the names of any of the credits from shows that you know the BBC has lost the original tapes for, let me know, I’ve been working on creating an archive of my own with a friend who's had to take a break to look for his missing roommate and every little bit helps.