Twelve months have gone by since my last update. Where did they go? Well:
Season Three of The Gilded Age, started airing on June 22nd and ran until August 10th. The ratings rose from Episode 1 to Episode 8 by 88%, and at last there was a real buzz. As I predicted in my previous update: it made a Season Four a no-brainer, and the decision came quickly. We began shooting on February 24th. It should have been the 23rd but we had to delay a day because of the Blizzard of ‘26. Photography will finish at the beginning of August and the show will air, it is said, as early as October. The ever-reliable Bannister will continue to supervise the Van Rhijn household, with his usual efficiency and tolerance, I read recently in a memoir that the perfect butler should enter and leave a room without anyone noticing, but I’m not a real butler, I play one on TV, and I like to make my presence felt.
I did a podcast interview for the fan website “Mummy Dearest” which sells TGA stickers and tee-shirts, and my son Tim, who’s nifty with graphics, sent a design to them, and it’s now available on mummydearestpodcast.co
m in the Gilded Age Merch section for the bargain price of $25. (I mean, it is a collector’s item.)
I’m very excited by a very dark comedy film called “Offsite”, in which I appeared as a ruthless manipulative IT company founder who influences his son’s company retreat in a way that knows no boundaries. I saw a rough cut in May, and I love it. Just as well as I’m an executive producer. Congratulations to Eric Cohen and Matt Hirschhorn, co-directors. I was suggested by Oscar Sharp with whom I made a film called “Leaves” for his NYU Film Course in 2013, so thanks to him also.
In November I went to the Opening Night of “The Immersive Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” at the Riverside Studios. The reviews were less than kind: “Bafflingly dreadful. More dire than a Vogon poetry recital.” But I particularly liked Rob Thompson who played Arthur Dent – who even sounded like me – though I wasn’t mad about the design of his dressing gown.
In the audio world, I recorded for Alison Larkin Presents, “The Hound of The Baskervilles” and for Simon & Schuster “The Devil Reached Toward the Sky – An Aural History of the Atomic Bomb” by Garrett Graff. It was my second time as Winston Churchill (the last was Graff’s “When the Sea Came Alive – An Aural History of D-Day”).
Two blasts from the past arrived on Youtube: “Remembering Doctor Who and the Seven Keys to Doomsday.” It’s about the short-lived stage show that ran at the Adelphi Theatre in London in 1974. It should have been a hit; the critics loved it; but the IRA started a campaign of dropping bombs into letter boxes in the West End, and the expected audiences stayed at home. I played “The Grand Master of Karn” (“Twelve feet of cobwebby malevolence” – The Times Literary Supplement) and after my defeat, I spent the second act as a Dalek. It was hugely enjoyable, and I’m sorry that the producers lost their shirts through no fault of their own.
The other curiosity is a BBC TV Play in a series called Sunday Premiere called “Claws” in which I starred with Brenda Blethyn in 1987 about the savage infighting in a cat-breeders club. The writer, my old friend Stephen Wyatt, alerted me that someone, unknown to him had posted it on Youtube. We’re delighted that it’s still available to see and enjoy.
Other engagements included a radio-show style reading of Hal Glatzer’s “Sherlock Holmes and the Nefarious Baron” in which I was paired with Jack Koenig as Dr. Watson, and we filled the parlour at The Salmagundi Club with Baker Street Irregulars;
I took part in narrating a podcast for the Westminster Kennel Club’s 150th Anniversary called “There is Only One” produced by Sarah Montague, and did the readings for Marble Collegiate Church’s Christmas Concert, and gave a very well-received concert of Broadway standards devised by Steve Brown and accompanied as ever by Nancy Winston called “How to Make a Musical in Five Easy Pieces”
My good friend Barry Day OBE died last June at the age of 91. He was the acknowledged and unchallenged expert on Noel Coward, and brought out a huge number of writings and compilations of the Master’s works, including his diaries and letters. I am particularly grateful to him for involving me in countless narrations, concerts and cabarets that he devised, and for allowing TACT (The Actors Company Theatre of which I was co-artistic director for a while) to produce some American and even world premieres of never-before-seen plays including ‘Long Island Sound’, (which has a cast of 27) and ‘Salute to the Brave’ (which was written to encourage the US to enter World War Two, but was pre-empted by Pearl Harbor).
As a footnote: TACT was wound up in 2018, when our irreplaceable executive director Scott Alan Evans decided, not unreasonably after 25 years, to set off in a new direction. His decision was providential, because the company would never have survived the pandemic.
2026 marks my thirtieth year as a member of the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels, an organization I’m delighted to support in honor of my father-in-law. However I do wish they’d stop bombarding me with emails trying to sell me stuff.
Oh, and I can’t let this update pass without acknowledging our cat Higgins who died suddenly, without fuss, or veterinary intervention, at 17 in September. When Nancy first adopted him from the Humane Society we were not friends, but over the years, and in the absence of Nancy, we became quite fond of each other (though as he was a cat, I can’t really speak for him).
