The King is back!

All hail the King! , Gary Boulter, formerly know as the King and now aptly named Clocks.

I remember back in 2019, giving actor Gary Boulter the monumental task of delivering Shakespearian length monologues to deliver in the course of 6 hours in my 2 and a half hour fantasy film, Quest for Steel.

I was amazed by his courage and expertise to do what would usually be weeks of filming for a standard production, reduced to a short day. But I wanted that theatre feel. I wanted the stage to feel well trodden, like it was a an actor on a stage committing to a command performance, come rain, come shine. Here was the rise and fall of a King and I wanted pomp and pomposity at the start of the piece and panic and deprivation at the end, which could only be realised by an actor feeling the stresses and strains of theatre lights bearing down on mere mortal form, sodden by calamity and circumstance. That or I simply did want to waste the kind man's time.

And yes, he delivered a very fine performance and I knew that whatever I would write in the future I would have Gary in mind.

The character of Clocks is akin to that of Q in the Bond stories. A Quartermaster with the plans and the props. But I thought Boulter playing the straight forward Desmond Llewelyn type would be like asking him to act with one hand behind his back, so within a minute of conceiving this character, Gary's rhythms came into my mind and I knew these lines should be cheeky, a kind of what if Private Walker, from Dad's army, was given the position of Quartermaster for a government agency after the wall or what if Arthur Daley from Minder was the fixit man for MI5? The result I think is better for the scene as it means Harriet Hughes can react as opposed to simply just listening.

In Episode 1: The Dressmakers, Clocks has been sent to undertake some undercover electrical work for the two suspicious clothing businesses and provides a blue print and valuable information regarding the two establishments to newly recruited TimeWar agent, Harriet Hughes.

Oh yeah and Mr Boulter does appear again in Episode 2, not as Clocks but as a more nefarious underworld character called Mel Palmolive, but more of that later.