Paul Bazely

Picture a sun lounger in Benidorm (2007) and two men beside it who cannot stand each other. Gavin, played by Hugh Sachs, and Troy, played by Paul Bazely, snipe across the pool, and theirs are the jokes that depend on a word rather than a bodily function. That is the Bazely part in one image: the man beside the louder one, holding the sharper line, in a show that would rather have the broader joke.

The career fits the image. He started in television with Making Out (1991), took an early film part as Biju in Mira Nair's Vanity Fair (2004), and then settled into Troy Ramsbottom, whom he played, with a pause for film work, until 2017. The films in the pause were big and the parts were small: Salaman in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011), a First Order officer in Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), a part in Cruella (2021). He turned up as the Man in the Woods in Black Mirror (2016). Blink and he is gone; look, and you will see a professional doing what the scene needs and no more.

What Benidorm shows is a man working harder than the writing. Nobody in that cast was coasting while the scripts increasingly assumed they would, and Bazely and Sachs were where the effort was easiest to see, because their material was the only kind a flat reading could ruin. We laughed at the lounger scenes more than the show had earned, and it was the two of them, not the lines, that did it. Such Brave Girls (2023), which we liked a great deal, casts him as Dev, the family boyfriend, and our review did not stop for him at all. That is not a complaint. Louise Brealey's appalling mother keeps us watching, and Dev is the man left in the scene with her, which is a kind of acting that shows up only when it goes wrong.

The stage is where he has been allowed to lead. At the National Theatre he played Gandhi in Anupama Chandrasekhar's The Father and the Assassin (2022), directed by Indhu Rubasingham, a part he has said he never expected: "I was then too young and am still too tall." It is not ours to judge here. But the casting makes a point the screen has been slow to make. Seventeen years of television have used Bazely as the second man in the double act. Somebody with a camera might try him as the first.