Too Antigonish

"I gave him, looking back at it, a really difficult job: to come into the core cast of a little show like ours after two series, as an adversary to one and a love interest to another, without either unbalancing it or feeling like an unnecessary add-on. Anthony did neither, he slotted right in as if he’d always been there, and his Beatrice and Benedick relationship with Stephanie Cole’s Carolyn provided some of my favourite scenes of the show - along with his superb 'voice-off’ against Roger Allam.

My favourite memory of Anthony from the show was when - as happened to all of us at one time or another - one little phrase suddenly became impossible to say. I think his was ‘soft shoe shuffle’. We all started playing up to the idea of ‘helping’ him get the line out, which of course made it far harder for him, and by the end, my memory is that I had taken his script and was crouched in front of him holding it up; and Ben and Roger were either side of him, arms round him, Roger crooning ‘you can do it, Tony’… as he tried to get the line out through tears of laughter.

And then when (of course) he finally delivered it immaculately, his exultant post-goal style celebrations took him across the whole stage.