By George, Galloway puts tin hat on desire
IS THERE any figure on TV more irresistible than Roger Allam in Endeavour? On dull evenings we keep going back to watch re-runs, and it isn’t just because of the lush Oxford settings of 50 years ago, or the sight of Shaun Evans frowning over some murderer’s ridiculous crossword code, based on the periodic table or legends of ancient Greece. No, the thrill is entirely about Allam as Inspector Thursday.
Indeed, when that fine actor was in a serious play at the National Theatre and I did an onstage interview, both he and the audience knew perfectly well from the start that we would need to move on to his time as the bluff old-school policeman: golden of heart, troubled at times by family dilemmas, knowing which day of the week it was by which sandwich his wife made for his packed lunch, and not unwilling to extract information from a villain with a brisk physical shake. Allam liked talking about being Inspector Thursday, just as we all loved listening.
Sadly, I forgot to ask him if he got to keep the character’s battered trilby hat: I would have liked to pat it reverently, just as I once did Elvis Presley’s wallet.
OFTEN, watching old documentaries or period films, I wish more men routinely wore hats. Not bowlers or toppers, but softish fedoras or trilbies.There’s something beguiling about that framing of the face, that silhouette, that shadow of the brim with its sense of manly purpose striding forward, that merciful concealing of thinning hair of age. Bring on the hats, I often say, as long as they’re proper ones and not hateful baseball caps with ridiculous slogans and stupid ears sticking out underneath. Let’s have real hats: how else would Thursday, or Rumpole, or Brando and Gary Cooper and Leonard Cohen have fixed themselves so glamorously in our affections?
Why else would our husbands, fathers, boyfriends and brothers look so unusually cool on holiday when the dashing straw sunhat comes out again? Why do we feel so gigglingly treasured, as ladies, when a chap tips his titfer to us in respect? I was musing happily on all this, thoroughly pro-hat. But you know what happened: George Galloway happened, back in public view as an aggressive new-fledged MP, talking rubbish and conspiracy theories about poor Princess Catherine. And suddenly, dozens of less likeable hat-chaps swam into memory: not the glamorous movie villains. We can cope with those. But almost every irritating poser we ever met, who relied too heavily on the hat. Like Galloway himself. Or the unnerving Gunther von Hagens of Body Worlds, a man who refused ever to be interviewed or photographed without his hat, even though his mission in life was making displays of other people’s plastinated corpses, dissected without even their skin on. Creepy, or what?