I didn't get any photos of them on stage as I arrived late due to having my photo taken with Michael. However these are two of mine.
When I arrived, very late, Paul was for some reason doing Servalan in a Liverpudlian accent: "We could rule the galaxy together, Avon." It would never work, he told us—she supported Liverpool and Avon preferred Everton.
Paul said he objected to some of the writing of Avon, for example, telling Dayna not to kill the Sarran. He thought Avon would have killed him. He also doubted that Avon would have registered Tarrant's voiceprint with Zen.
They got talking about diction. Mark Thompson said that Peter Miles always admired Jacqueline Pearce's Ts. When Paul looked startled, Mark explained that she had explosive consonants. Paul said he'd heard it as 'teeth'! Jacqueline said she'd had to unlearn a northern accent, and Paul said that many actors these days had poor diction. He bemoaned the rise of the 'dark L' as in "I want to have a cuddoo!" I bet that set Avon fans' hearts a-flutter in the audience.
What was Paul's first part? Oberon in a school play.
Orbit. Robert de Niro, Paul said, takes a gun from a chimney in The Godfather, so Paul did something similar in Orbit. He quipped that he's a mimic, not an actor, citing the Magnificent Seven homage in Orac. "There's no such thing as an original idea—including this one."
Mark said he would like to see Paul and Jacqueline run a bar in Eastenders with Gareth Thomas as a customer.
How did you like it when Avon wanted to kill Vila? Paul said he "enjoyed it immensely" and was sorry he hadn't. "It was logical to throw him off." The voice he used to call Vila was based on a scene from the film Strangers on a Train.
On Jacqueline calling everyone 'darling'. Jacqueline said that the English National Opera now had a rule that one couldn't do that due to sexual harassment rules; they fined you. She said, "I'd lose my whole salary in the first half-hour, darling."
Someone said that David Jackson had arrived (his first session had been cancelled as he was late) and Paul said, "Let's all join hands and contact the living." People laughed, but though I'd found his sniping at Michael Keating rather Avon and Vila, I thought this was very off.