I can’t claim to have known actor Michael Keating, who died this week, but I did interview him once and we did have at least one phone chat. And I want to tell you about that chat. Not because of what was said, I imagine now that it was just about arranging the time for the in-person interview, but because of precisely when it happened.

Please picture me taking notes as I watched an episode of Blake’s 7. Specifically, I’m sitting at the end of our couch, my MacBook is on the arm to my side, my iPhone is on the seat next to me. Maybe I should explain that I thought I wasn’t paying a lot of attention, because this was for work and the episode was not exactly one of the good ones. I was watching it for completeness, possibly to check some fact, I can’t remember, but this was a job and I would have sworn that my mind kept wandering.

Except there came this moment when Vila, played by Keating, has to exit the scene. From my perspective on my couch, he walks out of shot to the right of my MacBook’s screen —

— and calls the iPhone beside me.

It was precise, to the instant, as if the character had really gone off to do it. And I must’ve been a lot more into that episode than I thought because I was really thrown by the call.

Compare that to how the star of Blake’s 7, Gareth Thomas, clearly decided during a phone call that I was an idiot. He was right, actually, as I was trying all sorts of things to route that call through my Mac in order to record it, and with some exasperation he eventually suggested I just put it on speakerphone, turn up the volume, and record that.

I don’t think I ever phoned Paul Darrow, who played Avon, but I know when we met, he told me he was using me as an excuse for a fag break. We stood outside a studio, the wind making recording hard, the cold getting to me, and I can’t remember another word. Good thing I took notes.

Only, Gareth Thomas died in 2016, not more than a couple of years after I spoke to him. Paul Darrow died in 2019. Now Michael Keating has gone, too, and for some reason I’m most saddened by that. Nothing against Thomas or Darrow, but there was something so unassumingly likeable about Keating. And I can see his face lighting up as he told me that no, he didn’t mind talking about Blake’s 7 for the ten thousandth time, “I like talking about myself!”

There are interviewees you wish you’d never contacted, and there are ones where you have to grit your teeth to get through the recording, but then there are ones who are great for whatever you’re doing and there are ones who you just like. If you’ve interviewed actors, you know this: they are very good at being likeable because they’re very good at performing. Still, you can tell. And if Michael Keating was putting on a show for me that day all those years ago, he did it very well.

He wasn’t one of the Blake people I carried on talking to after the project was over, but now I rather wish he had been.