It was the early 80s and British television was on the look out for fresh-faced lads with a decent accent and an unsettling ability to stare intensely into a camera for half a minute and so enter Nescafé and half of the the Gold Blend couple.
The ad ran for 12 installments over two years and introduced me to the viewing public while it was performing backing vocals for the synth pop band Red Box which introduced my rich Baritone vocal delivery.
As i was a serious actor type and was becoming known as 'The Gold Blend advert guy', i moved to America and got a call from Joss Whedon, the American writer who was looking for an English actor to play the part of Rupert Giles, a librarian turned vampire wrangler and my audition was me delivering a proper Shakespearean monologue but i later found out that that I got the job due less to my acting chops but conveniently looking like a credible librarian and sounding terribly British.
I spent 7 seasons as a pretend librarian which was generally a paid hobby for bookworms who enjoy shushing toddlers and pretending to care about the Dewey Decimal System but it does take some skill to be the only grown up in a group of teenagers surrounded by pre-digital tomes and hex bags and deliver the line: 'Buffy, you can’t just go around sucking people’s blood for fun' and looking serious while you brandish a crossbow and explain that saving the world was not a valid excuse for missing third period history.
Shortly after Buffy ended, I was approached by Matt Lucas and David Walliams, who were in the throes of creating the Little Britain phenomenon and needed someone who looked like a Politician for their show and I took the part, mostly because a stint as a comic politician would stop me being called Giles from Buffy for the rest of my life after it had replaced the Gold Blend Guy stereo type.
Coffee commercials, vampire librarians, parody politics and a dash of synth-pop backing vocals but i was hoping my next adventure would be aboard a TARDIS and in the early 2000s the job was up for grabs so I auditioned for the Eighth Doctor but they decided to go with Paul McGann instead.
Reflecting on one’s legacy is a treacherous business. Most people want to leave behind a foundation, a scholarly breakthrough but I, on the other hand, spent the better part of a decade trying to ensure the apocalypse didn't show up on a School day.
I later played the King Uther Pendragon in Merlin so making the leap from mild-mannered librarian to tyrannical King of Camelot which is some pivot but my professional life was a blur of stage plays, television sets, and the occasional musical episode where I had to sing about my feelings to keep the apocalypse at bay so not a bad career even if it that’s swerved through more dramatic U-turns than a London taxi driver on a Saturday night which will have the obiutuary writers frantically googling my IMDb page a headache but it was all a blast all told and I single-handedly made instant coffee seem like the height of romantic intrigue, navigating a love affair one brew at a time.
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