All You Will Get From Me is My Support. And My Respect.

 I'm disproportionally sad about the death of Anthony Head. We played brother Murray's One Night in Bangkok, as a tribute on Friday night, but I don't think it was a very good tribute - a song about chess written by half of Abba for a musical is an odd post mortem tribute. Also, it starts with a whirling eddy of Eastern orchestral vamps that confused everyone. 

I've always loved Tony Head. I adored him as Rupert "Ripper" Giles, in Buffy, of course. (I love how Americans think Rupert Giles is a perfectly acceptable English name. We're all called Rupert or Nigel or Daphne, and our teeth are just falling out of our heads). Giles is a dream of an Englishman. A cinematic Englishman. He is brave, steadfast, tweedy, bespectacled, romantic, tongue-tied, steely, a technophobe with an insatiable desire for knowledge, handsome, dashing, has "a past", he's fiercely intelligent, witty, sexy, plays acoustic guitar with his eyes closed, and knows his way around the Dewey Decimal system. He's also kind, thoughtful, loyal and caring. If you were Buffy you could do a lot worse for a father figure, even though he does compel you to tangle with the undead on a daily basis. A small price to pay. 

Sadly, most Englishmen are not like this. 

The thing is, apart from being tweedy and firing off crossbow bolts (and an abiding interest in the Occult) this does seem to be exactly what Anthony Head was like. The Buffy set had a heap spoon helping of toxic masculinity from the top down, but since his death last week no one has had a bad word to say about him. They all adored him. He seems to have been a genuinely lovely man. The cast praise his acting, his timing, his good looks, but equally they all remember moments of sweetness. Not just the stars either: bit-part players, one off characters, young actors who thought they flubbed their auditions, all speak about his kindness, his thoughtfulness, his empathy. No one had a bad word to say about him. The opposite. Everyone adored him. That's a proper legacy. I doubt I could say the same. Some people, inexplicably, remain stubbornly immune to my charms, while I'm known in all the boroughs for being delightful. So Tony must have been a truly beautiful human being. 

I genuinely loved him in the Gold Blend adverts. I thought that's how you did it, they were a suaveness primer.  He was great as the original Adam Klaus in Jonathan Creek, so much snakier and cavalier than his wally replacement. He was a preening, shapeshifting alien in Dr Who, trying to convince the Doctor to lead them and take over the universe, and almost smooth enough to convince him - the purr was never more in evidence - until he got blown up in chip pan fire by K9. Bad dog. He was in Woof! and Fat Slags, but I haven't seen those. In fact, I've seen bugger all of his work since Buffy, and IMDB tells me he's been in everything. He was in Godspell in the 70's with Su Pollard! He sang backing vocals for awful pop band Red Box. He released a single version of Sweet Transvestite in 1991. Could this have spawned Suede and Pulp's polyester gender-bending decadence the following year? 

No. Obviously not. But it is clear Tony has had storied career. He's done it all and done no harm. 

He's Giles to me, and it's ludicrous for a middle-aged man to find a fictional librarian and vampire hunter an aspirational figure. It's unlikely, at this point, that I'm going to grow up to be Rupert Giles, especially as Giles would have been a decade younger than me when Buffy started. Giles is a good man. Not a perfect man, a man who has made mistakes, but one who has learned from them and tried to be better, to be decent, to be kind. And to become the proprietor of a magic shop and suffer constant head trauma. That sounds like a reasonable ambition. That sounds like it's worth having a go at. Giles is a fine man, and by all accounts, and despite his formidable acting chops, Anthony Head didn't have to reach very far to find that character. They all loved him.