It would have been early in 2005 when I met Patrick Stewart at Granada’s London offices. He’d relocated back to the UK after Trek and was pondering his options, of which the lead role in Eleventh Hour was one. He was unstarry and had dressed (I think) to avoid being recognised on the street; with his hat pulled down over his ears you’d take him for some guy on his way to a manual job.

My show concept was ‘a modern-day Bernard Quatermass with Emma Peel for a bodyguard”, a non-romantic pairing of two generations in which Hood was an emeritus professor, full of restless energy, his research career behind him but unwilling to settle down and sit on committees. He had a roving brief to intercede in any science-based crisis to prevent it from escalating into a disaster.

I thought Patrick would be perfect casting and I talked way too much. He said the thing he looked for in a project was the quality of the writing, and quoted a particular turn of phrase from the script.

So you can imagine how I felt when he then took the gig. The problems with the show came later, but that’s another story. RIP Patrick. You were real class.