The publisher’s puff to actor Michael Craig’s autobiography, a ‘fascinating, wittily wicked memoir of his life in film, theatre and television’, is unfortunate: not only is its conventional hyperbole on this occasion a cruel overstatement, but it misleadingly suggests a meaningful structuring of the events of Craig’s long career – in three media on two continents – that is nowhere apparent. Craig himself calls it more modestly a ‘rambling discourse’.

As Graeme Blundell observed recently of the autobiographer’s task, ‘Simply telling what happened rarely makes for compelling narrative. The job is to find the shape in unruly life.’ He is right: it is to massage the chronological sequence of events of a personal narrative into some sort of meaningful statement, argument or lesson perhaps. If only his editor had passed similar advice on to Craig, a ‘jobbing actor’ who has enjoyed an undeniably colourful career. He has credits in dozens of largely British films of the 1950s and 1960s, from Doctor in Love to The Cruel Sea. His extensive theatre work includes roles in provincial English weekly rep, with the Royal Shakespeare Company at one of the high points in its history, opposite Barbra Streisand in the West End production of Funny Girl and on tour with Australia’s Bell Shakespeare Company. He also played in television series as varied and well received as Doctor Who (for the BBC), The Danedyke Mystery (for Granada) and GP (for Australia’s ABC). Moreover, many episodes of these he scripted himself, among them the intensely moving The Fourth Wish and the hugely popular GP, both for the ABC.