Paul Ritter

For most of a decade he was doing two irreconcilable jobs at once. On Friday Night Dinner he was Martin Goodman, a suburban father who removes his shirt at the table and says the word lovely too often, one of the great sitcom grotesques of the 2010s. On Chernobyl he was Anatoly Dyatlov, the engineer standing in the control room insisting that what has just happened cannot possibly have happened. Same actor, same years, no overlap in register at all.

Ritter was an English character actor of the old school, trained on stage and used to being the third or fourth name on a call sheet. What he brought was precision about self-regard. His men are usually a little pleased with themselves, and he could tilt that into comedy or menace without changing his voice much, which is exactly why Dyatlov is so frightening: the performance is not a monster, it is a middle manager defending a decision.

The screen credits run wide rather than deep, which is the character actor's lot. Guy Haines in Quantum of Solace, the geography teacher in Son of Rambow, Galba in The Eagle, Chiffinch in The Libertine, Bentley Purchase in Operation Mincemeat, Wemmick in Great Expectations, Pistol in The Hollow Crown, the pathologist Billy Cartwright across several series of Vera, Turton in Belgravia. His stage work reached screens through National Theatre Live, where he played John Major in The Audience. He died in 2021. Goodman and Dyatlov, a year apart in the public mind, are what he will be remembered for, and there is nothing to compare either performance to.