Robert Lindsay

Somewhere in the middle of a speech, Michael Murray's arm goes up. Not for emphasis; it simply goes, as if it belonged to somebody else, and Robert Lindsay lets it happen without a flicker of acknowledgement. That is the Lindsay we keep coming back to: a performer built for the big gesture who does his best work when the gesture gets away from him. In G.B.H. (1991) he plays the new leader of the council as a man who has been performing so long he has forgotten there was ever an audience to lose, and then his body starts telling the truth his mouth will not.

He came up through television comedy in the 1970s, and Wolfie Smith in Citizen Smith (1977–1980) was the part that made him a household name. Musical theatre followed, with Me and My Girl in 1984, in London and then on Broadway. That training shows in everything after it. Lindsay moves like a musical-theatre man; he knows where his hands are and he knows how to make a room look at him. Bleasdale's trick in G.B.H. was to take that skill and point it the wrong way. Murray wants to be watched. Then he is watched for reasons he cannot control.

Alan Bleasdale is the writer who gets the best out of him, and Julie Walters is the partner. In G.B.H. she spends her scenes deflating him with a look, and the two of them are the best double act in the series; Bleasdale put them back together for Jake's Progress (1995). Robert Young directed G.B.H. plainly, letting Lindsay's tics play in the middle of wide shots so we watch the crowd notice before Murray does, and Elvis Costello's music stays low and out of the way of the shouting. We watched the speech where the twitch takes Murray's face and laughed and were horrified in the same breath, and we have not stopped thinking about it since. Lindsay himself has said of the series: "But GBH gave me that self-esteem back – it proved to me that I could still act."

Then came the longest stretch of his career, eleven series as Ben Harper in My Family (2000–2011). Critics loathed it for its thin plots and unfunny dialogue. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it at length here. What we will say is that a sitcom dad is a small room for a man who can do what Lindsay did with one arm, and he stayed in it for a decade. Since then there has been steady work in series such as Hornblower, Galavant and Sherwood, and Fagin on stage in 1997 for those who saw it.

Anyone deciding whether to give him an evening should start with G.B.H., and should expect it to take seven. The rest of the career reads like a man waiting for another writer to hand him a character who cannot keep his own arm down.