Before he embarked on his career as a television director, Roy Battersby and I met when he cast me as The Ghost in his ambitious “black jeans” production of Hamlet at University College London. It went on to be a finalist in the 1960 Sunday Times national student drama awards.
The eventual film and television producer Tony Garnett, then an aspiring actor, played the Dane, partly in a bid to catch the attention of the BBC producer Peter Dews, who was preparing his groundbreaking Shakespeare series An Age of Kings (also 1960).
It worked: Garnett carried a spear for Dews, and Roy began his career as an uncompromisingly radical television director. Our paths only occasionally crossed thereafter – I became curator of the National Film and TV Archive at the BFI. But Battersby, Garnett and I shared a cheerful reunion at a memorial celebration of David Rose, the founder of Channel 4’s Film Four, in 2017.
