Before he embarked on his career as a television director, Roy Battersby and I met when he cast me as The Ghost in his ambitious “black jeans” production of Hamlet at University College London. It went on to be a finalist in the 1960 Sunday Times national student drama awards.
The eventual film and television producer Tony Garnett, then an aspiring actor, played the Dane, partly in a bid to catch the attention of the BBC producer Peter Dews, who was preparing his groundbreaking Shakespeare series An Age of Kings (also 1960).
