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With over 50 years as a director of stage and screen, our Media, TV and Film Correspondent, Paul Joyce, casts his director's gaze over ITV's recent drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, and ponders on television's ability to influence public opinion. I have taken a personal interest in Toby Jones' career since we met, only the once and an occasion he will certainly not recall as he was only nine months old and fast asleep for the duration of my visit. His father, the legendary character actor Freddie Jones, had invited me to his London flat to discuss appearing in my first ever film, a totally illegal and unauthorised adaptation of a short theatre piece by Samuel Beckett (Act Without Words). For reasons which still escape me, Freddie had agreed to star in the film, which we were about to shoot on a rubbish tip in Rainham, Essex. After our meeting, which we in the profession would call a 'script conference,' even though there was to be no dialogue in the film
Photographer, artist and erstwhile Dr Who director, Paul Joyce, offers an insight into the making of the Time Lord. One can almost hear the sigh of relief breathed by Idris Elba when at last the young cub was painfully torn from David Tennant's side in an awkward and over-extended CGI sequence. A nod maybe to the book of Genesis but no mention of additional ribs or, thanks be, even a glance towards the other candidate for Eve's existence, the baculum. Rather we are presented with an athletic looking young black actor of undoubted Achillean appeal and bizarrely sporting only bone-white underpants for the remainder of the show. For my money quite a lot of fuss over barely spilt milk. Welcome to the world of "Bi-Regeneration" (as opposed to simply 'bi') which will allow Tennant whose Hamlet and no doubt Macbeth and Lear will all be overshadowed at least in legacy terms, by his stuttering appearances as The Time Lord. As one horrified fan just wrote: "wha