It’s funny how life works out. Liverpool-born actor Paul McGann had left school and was working in a shoe shop when he bumped into his old schoolteacher, Joe Hartley, who had given him the lead role in a school production of Antony and Cleopatra. Feeling McGann was wasting his talents fitting shoes, Hartley suggested he apply to Rada – which lead to a part in the snooker drama Give Us a Break opposite Robert Lindsay, then the lead role in Alan Bleasdale’s controversial first world war drama The Monocled Mutineer.
The rest is history. McGann went on to star as Marwood, the eponymous I to Richard E Grant’s Withnail in 1987 and then was cast as the eighth Doctor in the 1996 TV film, Doctor Who (the first attempt to relaunch the series following its 1989 cancellation).
