"Peter Wyngarde writes: 'It’s becoming the Mad Hatters Tea Party for me ... just phoned the number Samantha gave me [he means Sarah Yeoman, my PA] which I took down wrongly and got a complete stranger’s voice! As I’d scribbled the number down during cooking I’d obviously .... Apologies, but as Vivien [Leigh] says in GWTW ‘ca ira mieux demain’. Wondering if the mental dept would consider seeing me as soon as possible, before it’s too late ....' Peter is still living in Kensington, in the flat he shared for many years with Alan Bates. It’s an Edwardian warren of clerical ferocity – a tornado of books and papers and swelling pyramids of typescripts, half-finished, half-begun. His voice is still of great clarity and sound, his eyes unchanged since that period known as his prime. But he is no longer on stage or television. Film generally tells us that people of Peter’s age don’t actually exist, or, if they do, they are hopelessly infirm and in the way of the main storyline. He sits before me as one who knew his duty and did it, beyond all praise, alive in the cinema of the mind. He takes the bus down Kensington High Street and jumps off at the Albert Hall, where I have loaded my latest machine-gun. After the concert he comes backstage, all a-buzz, genuinely excited. It is a relief to receive praise from someone who has a true perspective on all things, and who is not easily fooled – if ever fooled at all. Someone, also, who has downplayed accessibility. Out in the hallway people nervously approach him to ask questions. ‘I am sorry,’ he cuts across them, ‘if I don’t answer you, but I’m hard of hearing,’ which isn’t true, but is the perfect way of telling people to get knotted, especially as the whispers of ‘It’s Jason King’ ripple loudly. Peter Wyngarde is what the world now calls ‘the real thing’ which, let’s assume, means serious artist. He adapts to different listeners, and the magnified popularity of his most famous television role was never his goal. His favorite actor is Jean Gabin, and Peter’s genius is such that all of his actions work on two levels. Jason King complexly became one of the most well-known names on worldwide television, but the meanness that England always shows to its home-grown talent was the reason why Peter gave up and left for Vienna, where he opened his own acting school. Invariably in search of ghosts, he came back, and he found Kensington still very much as it always had been, with Edwardes Square maintaining its true self in the new world of noise, noise, noise – computer noise, cell phones, pings of ringtones, alarm apathy, and the new mad craze for constant house renovation."