‘I know, I know, but I’m an old hand. Something’s wrong. It won’t be the first series to go down the drain this year, but something as huge as this, I can’t think they’d want to let it go. It’s the most fucking ambitious thing ever set up in England, it’s more ambitious than a movie.’ He paused for a moment. ‘These are tricky times of course.’ No good getting too alarmist, but he felt trouble. ‘Well,’ he said briskly, ‘maybe it’ll all work out yet.’ But George Washington was a wily old fox and he knew there was something. ‘You’re absolutely sure you don’t want to do Richard III after the other plays come to London?’

‘Jesus Christ, absolutely positive,’ said Anthony, ‘I’ve done my stint for fucking culture, I want that fucking series.’

‘Then pray for fucking finance,’ said George Washington.

Anthony was speaking to his agent from his dressing room in Stratford-upon-Avon on a Friday night before a performance of Othello. His dresser knocked at the door.

‘It’s nearly the half Mr Bonham, anything you need?’

‘No, no,’ said Anthony vaguely.

He was very disturbed by his agent’s news but automatically, for that was his job, he placed his lips gently together, began to hum till they vibrated and once again his head became the soundbox for his voice: I have professed me thy friend and I confess me knit to thy deserving with cables of perdurable toughness. The finance for the series would surely be found, it was too good a project to be lost. There are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered. By Christ they’d better not be thinking of anybody else for the part, no, surely it was his, all the producers had wanted him. God he was very tired: the filming for the World War II series was tedious and exhausting, running around Devon in the snow was as unromantic as much filming was – cold, wet, disjointed – and then too often to have to do a show at night. The snow had hampered them, the shots didn’t match, some they’d had to do again, and he was called again early Monday morning and he was recording television commercial voice-overs on Sunday afternoon. He was tired. He wanted to go home. But he would have to wait until after tomorrow evening’s performance of Hamlet.