John Barrowman

Watch him arrive. Jack Harkness stands on top of a tall building in a greatcoat, grins, and says something a little too pleased with itself, and the scene is his before anyone else has spoken. Barrowman does this in Torchwood whenever he is allowed to, and it is always likeable. He came up in musicals, from Anything Goes in the West End in 1989 onward, and he has never left the stage: the voice carries, the shoulders are set, every entrance is an entrance. That is the pleasure of him and also the limit.

The career divides neatly. There were the musical years, Anything Goes, Sunset Boulevard, later La Cage aux Folles (2009), with American television work in between. Then Russell T Davies cast him as Captain Jack in Doctor Who (2005), a flirt in a hero's coat, and the part was liked enough to be given its own programme. Torchwood (2006) ran four series and he led all of them. After that came Malcolm Merlyn in Arrow (2012–2019) and Legends of Tomorrow, a man who changes sides and enjoys the changing, which is Jack's trick with the charm turned to menace.

What works is plain enough. He makes a large ensemble programme feel as though it has a centre, and Torchwood needed one, since its first series spent so long insisting how grown-up it was. He is funny on purpose, he moves well, and he can hold a shot by standing still in that coat. He has said "I put a lot of my own personality into Jack", and it shows; there is no visible join between the actor and the part, which is why the part is so easy to enjoy.

What does not work is the thing we said in our review: when the scripts ask for grief he goes still, and the stillness reads as waiting for a cue. We felt it. By the third series, the five bleak episodes that are the best thing the programme did, we noticed that whenever a room went quiet we were watching Eve Myles or Gareth David-Lloyd rather than the man the programme is named around, and we felt a little guilty about it, because he is plainly working hard. The complaint most often made about him, that the manner is too polished, comes down to this: he plays what Jack wants the world to see, and stops there.

He now presents and works on stage as much as he acts on screen, and that suits him. Give him a stage or a rooftop and he knows exactly where the back row is. Give him a close-up with nothing to say and he will fill it anyway, which is not the same thing.