Mark Benton

Mark Benton got in through Mike Leigh, which is a harder door than most and a better training than most. Born in Guisborough in 1965, he turns up as Ricky Burton in Career Girls in 1997, then as Mr Price in Topsy-Turvy and a man at a bar in All or Nothing: three films by a director who builds characters out of months of rehearsal rather than pages of script.

What he made of that is a particular English register, the decent bloke slightly out of his depth, played without a trace of condescension. It works as comedy in Early Doors, where he is Eddie Bell, and in Gimme Gimme Gimme, and it works just as well when the material turns: Finch in Hustle, Wayne Taylor in The Street, Frederick Finch in Land Girls, Graham Woods in The Syndicate. He also spent 2011 to 2014 on Waterloo Road as the maths teacher Daniel Chalk, which is where a large part of the country first learned his face, danced on Strictly Come Dancing in 2013 and hosted the game show The Edge in 2015.

The late career is the interesting part. Daytime television handed him a title role in Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators, and playing Frank Hathaway across a cosy detective series only works if the lead is genuinely good company for hours at a stretch. He can do that. Film keeps him in single-scene parts, the father in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, a British Olympic Association official in Eddie the Eagle, Montfleury in Cyrano, and 2025 alone put him in Patience, Bookish and Down Cemetery Road.