I’ve hardly seen any examples of Robson Green’s acting but I think his round Britain travelogue show on the BBC is quite watchable and he recently shot an episode in Longniddry with Mark Benton who I am a big fan of. However, I remember attending a wedding in Sunderland many years ago where there was much bitching about him, so I know not everyone likes him. Maybe that’s a Sunderland thing 😉
Anyway, whatever his own merits as an actor, according to this interview in the Guardian he gave us Ralph Ineson, so a big thank you for that. And thanks to York Mystery Plays as well — I went once with my mum when Christopher Timothy was Jesus,
[Ineson] got involved with the York Mystery Plays – a tradition that’s been going, on and off, since the mid-14th century: a Bible story told every year, once performed on a roaming cart, then, by the time Ineson did it in 1992, at the York Theatre Royal. All the characters were played by the people of York, except for one professional actor, who that year was Robson Green.
“He was pretty lonely on his own, sat in his hotel. We’d go out for a drink and I ended up sharing a dressing room with him. And he said: ‘You’re not wedded to being a teacher, are you?’ I wasn’t, although I did enjoy it, but I hadn’t been to drama school, I wasn’t classically trained. He said: ‘Go home and watch TV tonight, look at the characters you could play.’ So I watched a soap, I watched the nine o’clock drama, and there were about five people I thought I could play.”