I always enjoy watching terrible people pretend to be baffled by the very different reactions to the deaths of terrible people and really decent people.

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The one thing I've taken from the reaction of deaths of Dolly Parton and Patrick Stewart is how much love there is towards people who represent goodness, and how much meaning they bring to people's lives, shaping the idea of the world they want to live in, giving them ideals to strive for.

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Sir Patrick Stewart, Anthony Head, Sam Neill. It’s a sad year for our hot genre father figures.

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And a lot of this comes from Stewart's performance. He'd always look for the more thoughtful way to play a line, and the writers reacted to that. It was a counter-intuitive piece of casting that paid off in spades.

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Same. There was something that felt really radical about having a TV hero whose superpower was not just intelligence but thoughtfulness, and a kind of moral seriousness. Who showed from that first episode that you “win” by seeking to understand what seems like a threat.

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