Not ga-ga, no. I’ve always been this way

What way, you ask? Well, self-absorbed and not noticing other people to my disadvantage. Terrible at making connections and very forgetful.
(I keep using that excuse as evidence for more advanced Old Gentleman’s Forgetfulness piles up. It comforts me.)
I listened today to my friend Roger’s film criticism podcast RIBBON OF MEMES in which he and his friend Nick provide two aging privileged white guys insight into films that have described as ‘masterpieces’. (That’s not me being nasty: it’s more or less how they describe their project.)

The latest film to wilt beneath their judgement is RESERVOIR DOGS and I was going to post a comment on the site, pontificating (mistakenly as it turns out) on the derivative nature of the script and on how impressed I had been with Tim Roth who previously I had only seen as the skinhead in MADE IN BRITAIN. And I thought, what had he done between the two films? I looked him up on IMDB and oh, yes I had forgotten about ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN (but I think I only saw it after RESERVOIR DOGS) and oh

And there it was. He was in RETURN TO WATERLOO, a musical written by Ray Davies of the Kinks, about a man who gets on a commuter train and goes mad (or maybe already has gone mad and maybe he’s killed someone) on the way to Waterloo station.

And so, of course, was I.

Now, I haven’t thought about RETURN TO WATERLOO in years. There was a commuter who was in the seat beside me, played by Christopher Godwin who I saw and cheered for some years later when he got a small bit in the Yellow Pages ‘Fly Fishing by J.R.Hartley’ commercial. Good for you, Chris! And it looks like he has had a decent career.

But isn’t it odd that I managed to remember Chris and forgot all about Tim Roth who went on to be A Pretty Big Star. We shared those two weeks of shuttling along the rails of Network South East and surviving on whatever the caterers could manage to get to us. Learning a lot about shooting in odd locations.

I’m not even sure that by the time I saw him RESERVOIR DOGS seven years later I’d retained any mental note of him. Harumph.

Well, if I get one of those Redo afterlives either I go to a completely different profession or if I do try to make it as an actor at least keep call lists and other reminders so I can recall who it is I’ve worked with. Because I don’t make note of it naturally and I’ve never been any good at networking, at all, at all.

Kenneth Colley was the lead and I was more deeply struck with how he made something out of the nothing that the script made his character. I remembered him, not that I ever worked with him again.

This has been number-umpty-ump in a series about missed opportunities and my fading mental faculties.