Bleak House
Andrew Davies’s 2005 adaptation of Dickens had two strokes of genius: first, its exciting half-hour serial structure; second, the casting of Gillian Anderson as brittle, manipulative Lady Dedlock. Anderson shot to fame in 1993 in The X Files, doggedly pursuing the unexplained and sparking many a male viewer’s crush. Since Bleak House she has lent her cool air of mystery and an accent honed by many childhood years in London to more British dramas, both costume and contemporary, most recently the Belfast thriller The Fall. Photograph: PR
The Persuaders
Impresario Sir Lew Grade’s most costly bid to break into the US market, The Persuaders threw together ex-Saint Roger Moore and Hollywood superstar Tony Curtis as rich playboys cum amateur sleuths. It had sports cars, a John Barry theme tune, the French Riviera and, above all, Curtis’s immense charm (Moore recalled that his co-star was smoking pot throughout its filming). The Persuaders was a hit worldwide – except in America. Only one series was made before Moore drove away as the new James Bond. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features
Downton Abbey
McGovern has always exuded class. Her first film, Ordinary People, won the best picture Oscar. Her follow-up, Ragtime, got her Oscar-nominated, and then she starred opposite Robert De Niro in Once Upon a Time in America. Since 1992, (when she married British film-maker, Simon Curtis) the Illinois gal has lived in London, juggling film roles, theatre, singing in a band – even trying TV comedy, playing herself in 2007’s Freezing, alongside one Hugh Bonneville. It wasn’t a big hit, but someone noticed their chemistry – and they were reunited in Downton Abbey as the Earl and Countess of Grantham. Photograph: PR
UFO
Ed Bishop is the classic big fish in a small pond. After the New York state boy studied acting in London in 1960, he became the go-to man for three decades when any British script required a Yank. He appeared in The Saint, had parts in Kubrick movies, voiced Captain Scarlet’s best buddy Captain Blue and joked around on the Kenny Everett Television Show. But his biggest moment came in 1969 as the star of UFO. In a world of jumpsuits and purple-rinsed spacewomen, his Commander Ed Straker was the bravest, blondest alien hunter in the galaxy. Photograph: ITV/Rex Features
Girls on Top
She’s from the same Chicago suburb as McGovern, but where the latter is all poise, Ruby Wax is all mouth. She started out serious at the RSC. But she honed a rude, lipstick-pouting persona for the sitcom Girls on Top, written with Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and Tracey Ullman. And she found her greatest role as a quick-witted interviewer. In several series formats she has interrogated stars and ordinary mortals alike with a warmth and perception that have endeared her even to the most reluctant fans of alternative comedy. Photograph: ITV/Rex Features
Episodes
How do you follow the job of a lifetime? As Joey in Friends, Matt LeBlanc was the last word in dim, sex-obsessed actor flatmates and a global smash hit. But a US spin-off series failed to fly. Enter the BBC, and a sitcom about two British screenwriters (Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan) trying to make a US version of their hit UK sitcom, while being lumbered with a preening, sex-obsessed star actor who used to play a dim, sex-obsessed actor in Friends … and LeBlanc was on the way to winning a Golden Globe for best actor in a TV comedy. Series three of Episodes is coming in early 2014. Photograph: PR
The Word
Pop carnival The Word – whose hosts included Terry Christian and Amanda de Cadenet – often mired Channel 4 in controversy but injected much-appreciated anarchy to Friday evening TV. And, from 1991, it also treated us to the company of minxish Virginian Katie Puckrik. She was a bubbly presence, sassy ringmaster and pleasingly direct interviewer, and helped give the kiss of life to a TV music scene that had been moribund for years. Later, she donned a nightie and hosted The Pyjama Party, a talk show with girls-only audience she devised and then transferred to America. Photograph: Stay Still/Photoshot/Dug Falby
The Protectors/Hustle
New Yorker Vaughn was familiar to British TV viewers as the laconic 60s secret agent Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. When The Persuaders folded, Lew Grade’s ITC reworked the Riviera-plus-sleuths-plus belting theme tune formula with Gerry Anderson of Thunderbirds fame as The Protectors in 1972. Vaughn supplied the heft in a trio of jetset crimefighters with Tony Anholt and Nyree Dawn Porter, but this show too was short-lived. Vaughn returned to British TV in 2004 in the BBC’s con-artist caper Hustle, and even found time to pop up in Coronation Street. Photograph: ITV/Rex Features
Colditz
Fresh-faced Wagner was quite a catch for the BBC in its landmark series about the Nazis’ “escape-proof” PoW camp. Wagner had several Hollywood hits under his belt and a private life that made headlines. He played a US pilot who schemed his way around the castle, and became – together with a British officer – the first to escape successfully. His freedom was brief though; his character returned in the next series after being recaptured in the company of another American face well-known to British audiences – Al Mancini, stalwart of 60s satire That Was the Week That Was. Photograph: BBC
The Fast Show
Over the years, fleeting glimpses of American faces on our small screens have always helped us to feel a little less insular. Johnny Depp outed himself as a fan of The Fast Show when he played a customer in a “Suit you” sketch in the last episode of the BBC series in 2000. “I went after [Paul] Whitehouse. I stalked him,” Depp confessed when invited to explain how he came to grace the hit comedy with his presence. Almost as ludicrously unlikely as Tom Cruise fighting it out with Cameron Diaz in a reasonably priced car on Top Gear in 2010. Photograph: PA
