Marshall Lancaster played one part, DC Chris Skelton, across two series and five years, and played him as the man on the squad most anxious to be useful. It is a modest gift, exactly used, and he walked away from it.
Fi1m perspective
Chris Skelton stands slightly behind the others. In Life on Mars (2006) and Ashes to Ashes (2008) he is the junior detective in Gene Hunt's squad, the one who fetches, agrees, gets things wrong and is told so, and Marshall Lancaster plays him as a man who would rather be shouted at than left out. The eagerness is the performance. Where Dean Andrews's Ray Carling sulks and Philip Glenister's Hunt bellows, Lancaster looks up, waits, and hopes.
He came to it by the usual route: amateur theatre in Macclesfield, Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, then guest parts from the late 1990s in The Lakes, Clocking Off and Holby City. Life on Mars gave him sixteen episodes and a regular character; Ashes to Ashes gave the same character twenty-four more, moved to 1981 London. Around them he did what jobbing actors do: a recurring boyfriend called Slug in Coronation Street (2006), guest turns in Casualty (2007), a two-part story in Doctor Who (2011) as Buzzer Edwards. Then, in 2013, he stopped.
Our reviews are honest about where he sits. In Life on Mars we did not single him out; the series belonged to John Simm and Glenister and we were watching them. In Ashes to Ashes, which we liked less, we found him, Andrews and Montserrat Lombard better than the plots they were handed, and Chris "sweeter and dimmer than ever". That is not faint praise. Playing dim without playing stupid is harder than it looks, and Lancaster never lets Chris become the idiot the scripts sometimes need him to be. He is slow, not thick, and he is loyal to Hunt in a way that makes Hunt's cruelty to him land.
The scene most people remember is the striptease in Ashes to Ashes (2008). Lancaster has said he "had a lesson with a stripper", and the commitment shows. We laughed, and then found we minded for him, which is the whole trick of the character: the joke is on Chris and we are never quite on the joke's side. It is physical comedy done by someone who trusts the audience to feel embarrassed on his behalf.
The limit is obvious. It is one part, played twice, and nothing in the guest work around it suggests he was asked to do anything else. Whether he could have, we cannot say. In 2013 he left acting and set up a plastering business in Macclesfield, where he still works. Most actors talk about wanting a proper job. He got one.
Biography
Marshall Lancaster is an English actor born on 5 October 1974 in Macclesfield, Cheshire. He is best known for playing Detective Constable Chris Skelton in the BBC series Life on Mars (2006–2007) and its spin-off Ashes to Ashes (2008–2010).
His other television credits include the role of Buzzer Edwards in Doctor Who (2011) and appearances in Casualty (as Keith Parr and Perry Dans), Coronation Street (as Slug) and Holby City. He began acting in the late 1990s after training and performing with youth theatre groups in Macclesfield, and also appeared in stage productions such as an adaptation of The Railway Children.
Lancaster's acting career ran from around 2000 to 2012. In 2013 he founded Marshall Lancaster Plastering, a construction company based in Macclesfield.
