For much of his adult life, Paterson Joseph has been obsessed with a man who has been dead for about 250 years. Charles Ignatius Sancho, the first black man to vote in Britain, is Joseph’s Twitter handle (@ignatius_sancho); his profile name on Zoom; and now the subject of his first novel. “I don’t know if it will ever end!” he says, as though Sancho is haunting him.
You could well be most familiar with Joseph thanks to his scene-stealing appearances in Peep Show as oily boss Johnson (“To be remembered by name for a character, with a sort of guilty joy, is… aw man, it’s marvellous,” he says). But the 58-year-old actor has had a stellar career on the stage and in TV shows like Noughts and Crosses, Green Wing, Doctor Who and the hit BBC submarine drama, Vigil. He is a reassuring presence; a sign that a production knows what it’s doing.
