Tony Gardner's trade is the professional man nobody listens to any more: the lecturer, the MP, the ex-husband allowed back into the house. He is exact about small embarrassments, and comedy has used him better than drama, which tends to write him as somebody else's problem.
Fi1m perspective
In Last Tango in Halifax (2012) John has left his wife for another woman and been allowed to move back in, and Tony Gardner plays him as a man who knows precisely how little he is wanted and has decided not to mention it. Caroline, who is Sarah Lancashire, runs the school and the house and the conversation, and John's job is to be in the kitchen when she would rather he were not. It is not a big part. It is the kind of part Gardner has made a living from: the grown man in a good jumper who has got something badly wrong and is hoping nobody will bring it up.
He came to acting late and sideways. He qualified as a doctor first and spent the 1990s doing both, as half of the double act Struck Off and Die with Phil Hammond, before leaving medicine at the end of the decade. The first big part was Brian Johnson in My Parents Are Aliens (1999–2006), a children's sitcom he also wrote for, and what followed were variations on a type: Michael, the awkward café owner in Jack Dee's Lead Balloon (2006–2011); Dan Miller MP in The Thick of It (2005–2012); Professor Tony Shales in Fresh Meat (2011–2016); a lieutenant colonel in Bluestone 42 (2013–2015). Lecturers, politicians, officers, husbands. Men with a title and a difficulty.
What he does with them is small and careful. He keeps the authority on the surface and lets the worry show underneath, in a pause before the answer or a smile held a beat too long, and it is funniest when the script trusts him to do it without a line. The comedies have been kinder to him than the dramas. John in Last Tango is written as a nuisance Caroline has to manage rather than a man with a life of his own, and across its eight years the series never found much more for him to do. We laughed at Caroline withering him over the coffee pot, and then, because Gardner plays the receiving end so plainly, felt sorry for a man who has no good answer and knows it. That is his gift and also his limit: he is good at being the one in the wrong, and he is seldom asked to be anything else.
The stage has asked more of him lately, with three plays for Peter Hall in 2009 and 2010 and Holofernes at the RSC in 2024, a pedant who is at least the centre of his own scenes. If a television writer ever gives him the middle of a drama rather than its edge, we would like to see what he does with it. Until then, look for him in the corner of the frame, apologising for something.
Biography
Tony Gardner (born 10 January 1964) is an English actor, comedian and doctor. He qualified as a physician at Guy's Hospital in 1987 and as a general practitioner in 1993. He combined medicine and comedy in the 1990s as half of the double act Struck Off and Die with Phil Hammond, and later left medicine to pursue acting full time. He serves on the national governing body of the actors' trade union Equity.
Gardner gained prominence playing Brian Johnson in the CITV series My Parents Are Aliens (1999–2006), for which he also wrote episodes, and Michael in the BBC sitcom Lead Balloon. He played Professor Tony Shales in the Channel 4 series Fresh Meat (2011–2016) and John in five series of the BBC drama Last Tango in Halifax (2012–2020). Other television roles include Dan Miller in The Thick of It and Lieutenant Colonel Phillip Smith in Bluestone 42 (2013–2015). He has also appeared in stage productions directed by Sir Peter Hall.
