I didn't get any photos as I arrived late from my photo session with Michael and Paul, and people could only use flashes in the first five minutes.
Gareth was in great form, but Glyn is showing his age (though recognisably an older Leylan) and getting rather deaf.
Gareth rejected the microphone, saying that when he was offered one at cons in the US, he always said, "I don't need one; I'm a British actor!" He was, he explained, a technophobe. Sheelagh Wells, his ex-wife and still good friend, got him a fax/copier/phone/voicemail machine and he tried and failed to use the fax.
What was Tom Baker like to work with? Glyn, who was in Dr Who, loved Tom Baker and was never bored in his company. He used to drink with Tom at the Kismet. Before Dr Who, he played Rasputin in Nicholas and Alexander and wouldn't drop his standards after that; he'd rather dig roads. He was out of work until Dr Who.
Gareth worked with Tom on Medics and shared a caravan with him. "He was as mad as a hatter, Nice man."
Glyn told us about working on Howard's Way. On one occasion his character was late out to the yacht because he's been "chatting up an old flame" in a pub, so he had to get out there at top speed on a rubber dinghy. The sea was rough and as he approached, asking "Permission to come aboard?" one of the cast beckoned him. Thinking he was meant to jump, Glyn did, and ended up hanging off the railings in high seas. All he could think about was whether the ₤20 note in his back pocket was all right.
Gareth told us about working on a dramatisation of a mountaineering incident. I had assumed all literal cliff-hanging was all done with SFX or camera angles, but Gareth really had to climb. At one point he got into a bit of trouble traversing a difficult bit but was told by the impressed director he'd stayed in character, saying something like: "I rather seem to have wrong-footed myself!" He got frostnip during filming and had to be warmed up in a snow-cave. Frostnip, he told us, is a milder and temporary form of frostbite.
What were Gareth's fondest memories of Blake's 7? They all got on so well, they used to laugh and joke all the time. When he was climbing the castle in Bounty, he pulled off part of the castellation, and remembers thinking wryly that he'd rather have been a dustman.
Why did he leave? Because he was typecast, the series was moving away from the original, and he wanted to direct some episodes in season 3. At the time, actors didn't do that; they refused and offered him more money instead. So he left. Ruefully, he said he'd never wanted to be typecast, but as a consequence now he was never first choice for anything.
Someone asked Gareth about Who Pays the Ferryman. It was extremely hot and half the cast and crew were nuts. The director was to be found "blotto on the quay each evening", a dresser threw himself out of a hotel window—he was all right; he only broke his ankle as it was a first floor window—and a cameraman shot himself after the series.
Glyn remembered being in Emergency Ward 10 as a doctor. This went out live and the actors didn't get a second chance at scenes. Once he called his girlfriend after a particularly demanding scene in which he examined a woman with a heart complaint to ask how he had been. He was wonderful, she said, but the earpieces of his stethoscope were round his neck the whole time.
Someone asked Gareth about Children of the Stones. This is the only thing Gareth has seen himself in—he'd had to watch it once before an interview—as he usually makes a point of never watching himself. He shook his head, recalling the "stupid hairstyle and flares". It was, he said, a great deal of fun and a good story. It was filmed at Avebury, an odd place; all their watches "went odd". They'd completed the circle with polystyrene stones for the series, but American tourists were wandering around while they were filming. One woman leaned against one of the stones and knocked it over. She was very upset. "It's been here 4000 years!" she wailed, "and I came along!"
Gareth on acting. Gareth went on to talk about acting. It was a great privilege to be an actor, meeting people and going to places. He considered himself as in the last generation of actors who can do TV, Shakespeare, panto. Nowadays, actors do the one thing they're good at, and many just play themselves. Acting was once a profession; it's now a business, and a nasty one. Gareth said he played Claudius in Hamlet for ₤280 a week; now three TV shows pay for a whole year of theatre. *
Gareth went on to bemoan the plethora of reality shows on TV. Someone said people should get rid of their TVs. Gareth was appalled at the thought; he says it should be used to show good drama to people who either couldn't get to the West End or couldn't afford tickets.
He'd said at one point that the age of the audience amazed him as surely we were too young to have seen Blake's 7 when it came out. I stopped him on the way out and said that even though it was an old program, the quality of the acting, dialogue, and script attracted people still, especially with the lack nowadays of anything else of its calibre.
* Footnote
Gareth said he played Claudius in Hamlet, but apparently he confused it with playing the part in a film. According to Joyce Bowen, a major Gareth Thomas fan, he played Polonius on stage at the Brunton Theatre in Scotland in February 2001 for two weeks. He did however play Claudius in a film shot solely for video in the UK in 2000. This was put out on DVD in late 2003 and is still available at amazon.co.uk and other dealers. Joyce says that Hamlet is played by Will Houston, and she recommends the DVD to any Gareth Thomas fan; the PAL video is hard to get.