'Cause your eyes are the green of tornado skies

[sovay]

The best thing about a photo I found tonight of John Vickery in 1981 is not that it headcanoned itself instantly as an image of the younger Neroon, it's that I had just been watching him in an American Theatre Wing seminar from that same year and been struck by how little of his older self in or out of character was immediately traceable in his thin collegiate face and especially his light Californian voice and so when looking out of mildly feverish curiosity for his notices that summer as Prince Hal I was really not expecting to find through nothing but chiaroscuro and expression his future Minbari bones.



Offstage, he had reminded me more of Kyle MacLachlan and barely looked old enough to have the bachelor's in mathematics which was part of his origin story. He tells it again in another seminar in 1998 and still has a nervous gesture of touching one of his eyes as if tired or distracted slightly; he's a great fidgeter in front of an off-the-cuff audience. I had gone looking originally for his voice, which turns out not even to be that mid-Atlantic when he's using it for himself. Three decades plus I had to notice this actor with my brain on perpetual standby for B5 and now it has an opinion.

To keep on the theme of theater, I had no idea until her obituary that Tina Packer started her career in the three-quarters burninated 1966 BBC David Copperfield with Ian McKellen and then the much more successfully recovered 1968 Doctor Who: The Web of Fear before she discovered she cared much less for acting than directing or producing, whence Shakespeare & Company. The last time I saw Hugh Whitemore's Breaking the Code was in 2011 at Central Square Theater and they are reviving it this spring with the actor I last saw as Gaveston in the ASP's Edward II in 2017, whom I expect to be a superb Turing and me to leave the theater muttering about Joan Clarke as usual. In lieu of a teleporter, I have to hope for a transfer of this High Noon.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

To keep on the theme of theater, I had no idea until her obituary that Tina Packer started her career in the three-quarters burninated 1966 BBC David Copperfield with Ian McKellen and then the much more successfully recovered 1968 Doctor Who: The Web of Fear before she discovered she cared much less for acting than directing or producing, whence Shakespeare & Company. The last time I saw Hugh Whitemore's Breaking the Code was in 2011

Oh, cool! I mean, not that she died, of course, I am sorry to hear that. But she was notable in a great DW guest role (the one you mention) and as I never saw her pop up in any other old telly, I just assumed her career petered out through children or general other sexism, like so many others. I'm very glad to hear that instead she was off doing something so great in the US; that's excellent.

It's very appropriate for the DW character too - Anne Travers is a scientist who helps investigate the mysterious foam/web problem in the Underground, and when chatted up by a captain who asks, "What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?" responds with a brilliantly deadpan, "Well, when I was a little girl, I thought I'd like to be a scientist, so I became a scientist." <3


Also that paragraph was a ride, because then you brought in Hugh Whitemore who I think I DID know via some internet circling about had written that play, but who to me is first and foremost the BBC 1970s guy who writes the episodes of any given Tudor or other period drama that will wind up being some of the best TV eps of all time and usually BAFTA bait with it. You've probably heard me mention "The Serpent and the Comforter" at some point, - the particular episode of Shadow of the Tower that I am very annoying about from time to time, because it is basically this amazing and deeply weird morality play about faith and death plonked right in the middle of a BBC 1970s period drama. (It's not the only wonderfully weird installment, which is why I love the series as well as its star, but it is unquestionably the most memorable one). I'm pretty sure he also wrote the Babington conspiracy episode of Elizabeth R, the one that has David Collings as Anthony Babington, doing his usual routine of committing crimes, sobbing, and dying.) He certainly wrote at least 1 ep of that, anyway, as that's where I first noted his name.

(It is VERY incestuous in Brit TV/theatre land, though, it has to be said, so it isn't that surprising, and it's also hard to avoid Tudor dramas.)

That pic is very recognisably Neroon, too! Clearly sensing some strange fate ahead of him...

[sovay]

But she was notable in a great DW guest role (the one you mention) and as I never saw her pop up in any other old telly, I just assumed her career petered out through children or general other sexism, like so many others. I'm very glad to hear that instead she was off doing something so great in the US; that's excellent.

I am glad to have been the conduit of better news! I had that happen with one of the cast of Square One TV (1987–92). It was his sole screen credit; I worried vaguely about him for years, finally braced myself to find out he had died of AIDS or been run over by a bus on Ninth Avenue circa 1993, and found out instead that he had become an award-winning author and illustrator of children's picture books whose previous career just happened to include the one educational sketch comedy about mathematics. Packer looks like she never went back to film or television even after she had gotten back into acting on her own terms. She can be seen from that point on in clips on YouTube.

Anne Travers is a scientist who helps investigate the mysterious foam/web problem in the Underground, and when chatted up by a captain who asks, "What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?" responds with a brilliantly deadpan, "Well, when I was a little girl, I thought I'd like to be a scientist, so I became a scientist."

That does sound very much like the woman who played her.

*hugs*

Also that paragraph was a ride, because then you brought in Hugh Whitemore who I think I DID know via some internet circling about had written that play, but who to me is first and foremost the BBC 1970s guy who writes the episodes of any given Tudor or other period drama that will wind up being some of the best TV eps of all time and usually BAFTA bait with it.

Breaking the Code was one of the first plays I bought for myself in high school, talismanically shelved through so many rooms since that its spine has sun-faded almost to powder-pink. It wasn't ground zero for Turing's importance to me—I had known about the Turing test and computable numbers—but it was a profound contributor and directly sparked a quest for the deeply out-of-print source biography which my brother finally tracked down for me as a birthday present something like a decade and a half later. I have argued with pieces of it for years and will still try to see any production within an accessible radius of me. It's difficult for me to remember that Whitemore wrote any other plays of his own, let alone television, even though intellectually I know both of these things and a handful of film credits to be true. So I have the opposite reaction whenever he comes up in a conversation!

(It is VERY incestuous in Brit TV/theatre land, though, it has to be said, so it isn't that surprising, and it's also hard to avoid Tudor dramas.)

Case in point, about a month ago I watched the four fuzzily surviving telerecordings of the aforementioned David Copperfield because it contained Colin Jeavons and Clive Francis and at no point made the connection that it was the same Tina Packer from Lenox's own Shakespeare & Company, which in terms of small worlds is ridiculous.

That pic is very recognisably Neroon, too! Clearly sensing some strange fate ahead of him...

Oh, alyt, you have no idea . . .

(I love seeing the flicker of people in and out of their younger or older selves, but this one really was surprising both ways.)