He informed Colin Dexter that he would like to have played cricket professionally for England if he had not become an actor, so Dexter devised the storyline for Deceived by Flight (1989) in which Sergeant Lewis has to go undercover in a cricket team to investigate drug smuggling.
[on John Thaw] John had a wonderful sense of humor which is belied sometimes by journalists' impression of him as irascible. He loathed the whole celebrity circuit. In between takes he was like an Irish storyteller in a bar - he wouldn't tell jokes, just stories and you would find yourself rolling around and crying with laughter. He was a wonderful mimic, particularly of people on the set rather than famous people.
