There is a man. He has been in our living rooms longer than the stain on the Queen’s best china. He is Anthony Head, and his career is so quintessentially British it probably owns a small thatched cottage in the Cotswolds and writes letters to the Times about the state of the village green.
Let us begin at the beginning, as all good British epics must, with a man in a kitchen. The year is 1991. The nation is deep in the throes of a recession. And what does the BBC offer? A man with a voice like warm gravy, twinkling eyes, and the sheer audacity to suggest that a jar of instant coffee could be the solution to all life’s problems. “Nescafe Gold Blend,” he cooed, and a generation of housewives swooned. The nation’s caffeine consumption skyrocketed. Relationships were saved, or at least temporarily perked up. He was the thinking woman’s crumpet, albeit one who came with a complimentary jar of granules.
But Head, like a fine wine, did not merely rest on his caffeinated laurels. He moved on to higher, or at least more demonic, callings. Enter Rupert Giles, the Watcher in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Here, Head perfected the art of the tweed-clad, bookish, yet terrifyingly competent British intellectual. He could quote Latin while decapitating a vampire, and do it all with the weary resignation of a man who has seen his pension fund decimated by the Hellmouth. Giles was the anti-David Beckham: he wore cardigans, he had a doctorate in the occult, and he was infinitely more dangerous with a crossbow than a footballer’s boot. For seven seasons, he was the calm eye in the storm of Joss Whedon’s apocalyptic maelstrom. And for that, we salute him.
Then came the brief flirtation with politics. “Little Britain” gave us the Prime Minister, a spineless, utterly hopeless twit who couldn’t run a bath, let alone a country. Head’s performance was so painfully accurate it felt like a leaked Cabinet Office memo. He captured the essence of a man whose spine was made of blancmange, whose handshake was a weak apology, and whose policies were scribbled on the back of a beer mat. It was a satire so sharp it could have drawn blood. But perhaps it was too close to the bone. The real politicians watched, and saw themselves. They didn’t laugh. They commissioned a review.
And now, in his twilight years, just when you thought he’d settle for a quiet life of voiceovers and the occasional P.G. Wodehouse adaptation, he appears in “Ted Lasso.” Not as the American fool, of course. No, Head is the enigmatic, moustachioed, possibly villainous owner of AFC Richmond, a man whose every eyebrow twitch is a weather system. He brings a touch of class, a dash of menace, and a deep-seated, entirely understandable resentment of American optimism. He is the British psyche personified: a repository of repressed emotions, a lover of rugby metaphors, and a man who knows that a proper cup of tea is more important than any football match.
So what do we learn from Anthony Head’s odyssey? That the British career is a meandering path, a hedgerow labyrinth with no clear exit. It is selling coffee. It is fighting vampires. It is mocking politicians. It is brooding in a corporate box. It is never, ever, doing anything as vulgar as an American-style, single-minded career arc. And we love him for it. He is a national treasure, on loan from a world of tweed and tea. Let us raise a jar of Gold Blend to the man who taught us that sometimes, the most quintessentially British thing you can do is pour yourself a cup of coffee, consult a dusty tome, and prepare to face the apocalypse with a stiff upper lip.
God save Anthony Head. And God save the instant coffee industry.
