Recent sad events have seen everybody behaving exactly as you would expect. There’s nothing wrong about that. A certain continuity of conduct is reassuring, a truism that the late Queen herself exemplified better than anyone. Her job was to be regal. Similarly, it’s the job of chippy academics to spill their thoughts, of the New York Times to froth at length, and, of course, of mad actors to be mad.
It might be argued that the job of an actor is to act, but such an objection belongs to a vanished world and certainly does not apply to the actors who have moved beyond simply saying other people’s words for a living.
We were blessed by two fine examples this week. First was Dougie Henshall, DI Jimmy Pérez in Shetland (2013 – ongoing) and Motor Cyclist in Taggart (1990). Last Friday at 9.10 a.m., suggesting possibly a morning after the night before, he tweeted:
Why do some actors do this kind of thing?
‘Do you think the Queue would be so long if people knew that the Queen isn’t in that coffin? Or do they know and it’s just symbolic?’
This clearly excited a spirit of competition that could be answered only by Michael Sheen, OBE-boomeranger and self-proclaimed non-for-profit entity who cannot stand not to be beaming from some media device at any given hour of the day.
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