Just Ask For The Guest Cast For Episode 3 Of South By South East

As you may recall, when I last left you on the subject of The Diamond Brothers, I had finally managed to see their 1991 TV series for myself -- but that threw up a brand new mystery. I'd already known that episode 3 had been interrupted by a technical fault, but getting to see the show added something significant: the net effect of that fault, and the way ITV dealt with it, meant that any actor who was only in the affected episode was not credited onscreen at all. So I had seven characters in search of an actor.

I included screenshots of all seven in that post, and after spreading it far and wide, I'm happy to report that four have been identified. So where are we now?

First up was Mr. Blondini:

Mr. Blondini is Jonathan Coleman, who can be seen here hosting the closedown of the short-lived BSB music channel The Power Station in the early hours of 8 April 1991 -- oddly enough, the day before the broadcast of episode 3 of South By South East:

Next up is Mr. Webber, of whom four or five different people have said either "that looks like John Bluthal" or "that is John Bluthal", which a side-by-side comparison confirms:

And giving us a full house on the other residents of the guest house, Mr. Ferguson was Peter Copley, as identified by Charles Wynford Lodge. The picture on the right is Copley in the One Foot in the Grave episode "The Eternal Quadrangle", recorded approximately one year before filming on SBSE took place:

Next up is Mr. Innocent, and this one threw me for a bit.

Two people independently suggested that Innocent was Jim McManus -- who appeared in the film adaptation of the first Diamond Brothers book, Just Ask for Diamond, as the newsagent Mr. Hammett. And I didn't think that Mr. Hammett looked very much like Mr. Innocent:

But then a third person suggested McManus was indeed also Mr. Innocent -- and that person was, erm, the casting director for South by South East, Susie Parriss, who very kindly took the time to reply to the email I sent to her. So I sought out a role of McManus' closer to the time of SBSE, where he might also have had a beard. By luck, he was very pleasingly in an episode of Press Gang the year before SBSE, "Friends Like These", also taking part in a meeting with our teenage protagonist under false pretences:

Boom, as I believe parlance goes. That's got to be our man -- as pointed out to me on Twitter, look at the angle of his eyebrow, and the slight brown bit lower down on his beard. It's not very likely that two different people could have those specifics. Curiously, I can't find another picture of McManus wearing glasses -- is it possible that the production was trying to disguise the recycling of an actor from the film in another role?

* * *

Now, I mentioned I'd been in touch with the casting director, Susie Parriss, earlier, but her cast list doesn't have the names for the last three actors (and also didn't include McManus), whom I'm still in the dark about. First up is the delivery man:

In the comments of the last post, commentator Crashed Dummy, who also pointed out the specifics shared by Jim McManus in the two pictures of him above, suggested that he could be Nigel Lambert, who later narrated Look Around You; that would certainly fit with Lambert's CV of around the time. I can find two other contemporaneous roles of Lambert's -- these are from, respectively, his guest spot in an episode of The Bill, "The Last Laugh", broadcast in August 1991, and an appearance in an episode of The Upper Hand, "Business and Pleasure", from early 1992:

After consulting with Charles Wynford Lodge again, I'm still not ruling it out completely (especially since there's limited footage to go on in all three shows, and in SBSE the deliveryman is only seen from the side)... but we're leaning towards "no" (Charles points out the deliveryman's ears seem to be higher up, especially compared with the Upper Hand picture).

And finally we have these two lads, the ticket inspector and the police officer on the left.

Now, if the deliveryman only has a few lines, these two only have a few words. You may think that the only way I'd be able to get these peoples' names is if I managed to get access to the original production paperwork (and no, I have no idea how I'd go about doing that).

But I will point out that the cast list for South by South East is pretty high-quality, and more or less everybody in it popped up somewhere else in British film or television at some point. Even Victoria Worsley, who plays an unnamed secretary with three lines in episode 2 as her first TV role, went on to have one of the main parts in a CBBC series adapting Diana Wynne Jones' Archer's Goon the following year, and Edward Hibbert appears for a single scene in episode 5. So it is my belief that these two probably do appear in some other TV series, somewhere. Anywhere...

With thanks to Charles Wynford Lodge, Chris Rubery, Crashed Dummy, Susie Parriss, Simon Drake, Neil James, and everyone who helped bring this little mystery to the widest audience possible