More generally, you do rather feel we’ve mislaid a whole breed of actor somewhere down the back of the national sofa, those gloriously overcooked, theatre-forged creatures who did the hard yards before swanning onto our screens. The sort who’d spent years declaiming to the gods and three pensioners in Row G before anyone pointed a camera at them.

They had a kind of mischief about them, a sense that a role wasn’t something to be handled politely with tongs, but gleefully chewed, spat out, and reassembled with extra bits left in. A raised eyebrow here, a mad flourish there, all the things that make a performance feel like it might, at any moment, go deliciously off the rails. You don’t get that same reckless sparkle from the more carefully assembled screen-only types.

And Tim Curry?

Absolutely one of the high priests of that particular church, right up there with the likes of Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi, and Alan Rickman.. even Buffy's Anthony Head, all of them with that shared glint of “shall I behave, or shall I have fun instead?” and, more often than not, choosing chaos.