Haven’t I seen you somewhere before!
How the same actors seem to appear in EVERY big new TV drama . . .
They say you can never have too much of a good thing — but TV casting directors are testing that proverb to the limit by filling every major drama serial with the same faces. This month, the trend for using only the most fashionable actors reached absurd heights on Sunday nights, where one actor starred in the blockbuster 9pm series on BBC1 and ITV.
Tom hollander, 5ft 5in in his socks, was a towering presence as the titular Doctor Thorne (the adaptation of the Anthony Trollope classic) and as the seedy, vicious bagman Lance ‘Corky’ Corcoran in The Night Manager.
A pattern quickly emerges, because the previous male lead of a Sunday night smash became the star of two top-rated serials during the week.
James Norton set hearts a-flutter in War And Peace as moody Prince Andrei, is now the hero of ITV’s Grantchester and was the villain in the BBC’s happy Valley.
One minute he’s a psychopathic rapist, the next a vicar with a penchant for solving crimes. It helps that as Tommy Lee Royce in happy Valley he was shavenheaded, while as the Reverend Sidney Chambers he has a mop of boyish hair, but it’s more than a little odd to have one man in two such different roles.
And that’s not to forget he was recently in a version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
It’s not just the men. While Tuppence Middleton was portraying the amoral, sexually insatiable helene in War And Peace, she was also the naive and needy Miss havisham in Dickensian, on BBC1 any and every night of the week.
NO SOONeR had Jessica Raine finished starring as amateur sleuth Tuppence Beresford in Agatha Christie’s Partners In Crime, she was tough single mother Annie, the heroine of ITV period drama series Jericho, running a lodging house in a Victorian shanty town. As Annie, she wore a ridiculous wig that looked like a ball of knitting pressed down on her head, but she was still recognisable as Jenny Lee from Call The Midwife, not to mention henry VIII’s scheming sisterin-law in hilary Mantel’s Wolf hall, which was on our screens last year.
Without doubt, the stars of so many multiple shows are immensely talented and have worked hard, perhaps for many years, before enjoying this avalanche of success. But the actors’ union, equity, has about 40,000 artistes on its register.
For the other tens of thousands, the actors who count themselves lucky to get one telly job a year, it must be galling to switch on and see yet again, for example, Gillian Anderson.
She is starring as Special Agent Dana Scully in the revival of The X Files (C5, Mondays), but very recently she played a plotting aristocrat in War And Peace, and not long before that portrayed DSI Stella Gibson in the crime series The Fall, which returns to BBC1 later this year.
We must celebrate these prolific actors. But if lazy casting choices are keeping other potential stars from our screens, that’s not much cause for celebration.