Coke and Rigby

A couple of recent obituaries caught my eye. Both the deceased were people who, although not really famous, had done work that I much enjoyed.

Peter Coke was the smooth voice of the eponymous hero in the best of the Paul Temple radio shows. He was entirely believable as an essentially unbelievable character – no mean feat. In a nice piece in ‘The Independent’, that excellent writer Jack Adrian recalled a chance meeting with Coke and his surprise when Coke told him that Temple’s glamorous wife Steve was in reality a rather dumpy little lady (but played with an improbably appealing cut glass accent), Marjorie Westbury. It would probably have come as even more of a surprise to radio listeners in the 50s to discover that the uxorious Temple was played by a gay man.

Terence Rigby, who has died at the age of 71, was a tough guy in films such as Get Carter and Tomorrow Never Dies. But I remember him best as the gruff but likeable PC Snow in that long-running TV series ‘Softly, Softly’. This was essentially a spin-off from the classic ‘Z Cars’, but so well done that it took on a fresh momentum of its own and ran for around a decade. Very well cast, with the likes of Stratford Johns and Frank Windsor in the leading roles, it remains one of my all-time favourite cop shows. Rigby was a first-rate actor, never a household name but nonetheless a reliable presence in film and television for forty years.