In honour of Paul Walter’s recent Spooks puzzler (answer here), I have one of my own.
It’s about the character of Sholto who was in Monday’s BBC One episode. The actor who plays him appeared alongside one of the regulars in an episode of another major TV series. Which one, and why was the Spooks regular’s appearance in that series particularly notable?
Incidentally, Ros states that Sholto used to be a government minister. I’m not sure if this is supposed to be about the actor’s previous role in Spooks – as a peer – but it could be a sly reference to his playing a minister in State of Play.
Sorry – I thought this was a Facebook thing:
Paul Walter wrote
at 7:41am
Which one was Sholto? Was he the ministry of defence bod pretending to be a long haired dissident? OR was it the bloke trying to recruit Ros? They don’t seem to list the cast in each episode (I once had to email the programme staff to find out the name of an actor in one of the episodes).
Is this something to do with Cold Feet?
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Paul Walter wrote
at 7:42am
Do you mean Yalta, rather than Sholto?
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Paul Walter wrote
at 7:57am
Incidentally, I notice that Peter Firth who plays Harry was in the Double Deckers!
Sholto was his name, but he was representing an organisation called Yalta – and all the credits are available here.
And is the answer Gemma Jones in the first episode of Inspector Morse where her claim to fame is being the first murder Morse solved on TV?
And talking of Peter Firth, what’s his connection to a classic piece of 60s TV sci-fi?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0611652/
Ah you gave me the answer! What a shame – I was looking forward to struggling a bit more, but I don’t think I would have got it.
Can’t find any Peter Firth performance before 1970. Was his father or mother in something. Did he have a bit child acting part in Dr Who or The Prisoner or Doomwatch or something?
And Nick is correct, as you’ve worked out. Gemma Jones played Anne Staveley in “The Dead of Jericho”, becoming the first character to die in the TV series Inspector Morse (also in that episode is Patrick Troughton in one of his last TV roles).
No idea on Peter Firth – he was in The Flipside of Dominick Hyde and its sequel in the 1980s, but that’s 20 years too late…
The answer is: Peter Firth played the astronomer Fred Hoyle in ‘Hawking’ in 2004. Fred Hoyle co-wrote A For Andromeda.
…which also featured the actor (who appears to be British) who plays the CIA’s Bob Hogan in Spooks.
…and, by complete coincidence, just a few hours after finding that out I’ve listened to a Doctor Who commentary and heard Russell T. Davies mention that the same actor played a B. Stoker in Children’s Ward and gave his name to a character in the Who ep “Smith and Jones”.