The Chauvelin Effect

Talking with my friend Isabel the other week, I wanted to put a name to the specific phenomenon of enjoying an actor in something, and retrospectively realising that actually they were in something else REALLY MEMORABLE AND SIGNIFICANT to you a long time ago, but you never made the connection that they were the same person. It’s like a kind of actorly deja vu only without any sense of remembering they are familiar and you have in fact seen them in things before. So the complete opposite of how I usually watch any TV/movies from Britain, which consists of pointing out all the actors who have been in Doctor Who, Press Gang or Carry On Movies.

I wanted to name the syndrome after Rupert Graves, as I am still frankly recovering from the retrospective shock of discovering that the actor who played Jolyon Forsyte (my favourite character) in The Forsyte Saga was the same actor who played the floppy-haired Freddy Honeychurch in Room with a View back in the distant 80′s.

Isabel, however, argued quite rightfully that actually this phenomenon could only be named for the experience we had both shared, of rewatching the classic Anthony Andrews and Jane Seymour version of The Scarlet Pimpernel in the 21st century, only to discover that the reason we remembered Chauvelin as being really excellent and acting everyone else off the camera was in fact because he was played by SIR IAN FREAKING MCKELLEN.

I’ve had a couple of experiences of the Chauvelin Effect lately, so very glad that I now have a name to put to it when relating the anecdotes.

There was a TV series I really liked in the 90′s called The Riff Raff Element – and unlike everything else on TV I loved in the 90′s, I didn’t manage to commit it to video tape, so I only ever watched it once. It’s the kind of show, though, that burrows inside your head, so every time you see an actor for it in someone else, you relate them back to it. Or so I thought!

I recently found the second season of the show randomly on YouTube – and thus had the quite surreal experience of watching Season 2 of a TV show twenty years after watching Season 1 and yet needing no catch up at all, because it felt like I’d been watching it only yesterday. (Yes, in case you are wondering, this did make me feel exceptionally old) And there was Celia Imrie, and that actress who I later saw as a New Ager in Ab Fab (Mossie Smith), and that actor who I always think looks a bit but not quite like Peter Davison (Nicholas Farrell), and the one who always says No No No Yes in The Vicar of Dibley (Trevor Peacock) and so on. For those who like to spot Doctor Who connections, Ronald Pickup plays the oppressive posh Dad, and his apologetic eldest son Morty went on to play a Silurian torturer in New Who… but anyway.

Watching Season 2, I couldn’t help wondering what happened to the actor who played outraged bohemian Alisdair. He was quite good, really. Nothing familiar at all about him, largely because I remembered him so clearly for this role, but his name didn’t ring any bells. So I did what you do now, and Googled his name. Only to discover that he is married to Emma Thompson. And THEN the name sounded familiar, Greg Wise as in Willoughby from Sense and Sensibility. Turned out he had also been in Cranford which I had watched only a month or two ago.

Of course, little dawning revelations like this don’t actually mean anything to anyone unless they’ve watched the exact same things that you have. Luckily I had friends who were into costume drama who could appreciate this particular gem. But having a name like ‘The Chauvelin Effect’ does make it all seem a lot more important!

My latest example wasn’t at all twenty years in the making, but made me smile. One of the benefits of having a paid subscription to the BBC iPlayer is that I get to catch up on shows that I missed when they came to Australia – or to see shows that never made it here. It’s never really recent shows but frankly I’ve got nine years of TV to catch up on since becoming a parent anyway.

This week I discovered Watson and Oliver, a really fun comedy duo writing and performing sketch comedy. They reminded me a lot of French and Saunders, and I really liked many of their running gags and regular characters, which is totally what you want from a sketch comedy show. Episode 1 featured a fun use of guest star John Barrowman, as the two comedians set him up to sing a love song to them both, and he ended up singing a love song to himself.

This theme was continued across the season, with the “real life” versions of Lorna Watson and Ingrid Oliver continually trying to one up each other with their amazing talents, leading into the musical number at the end. At one point, Lorna reveals she’s in the running for playing the new Bond girl, while Ingrid beats her by being in the running to play the new James Bond, and they reminisce regularly about how David Tennant is always stealing the parts that Ingrid really wants to play. In the final episode of Season 1, they stage their own Olympics ceremony on the cheap, at least partly because Ingrid is jealous that David Tennant got to run with the torch and she didn’t (I think this is a Doctor Who reference because I’m pretty sure he didn’t in real life).

And today, having enjoyed the show, I thought I’d look up if they had done anything else beyond their show, only to discover to my genuine surprise that Ingrid Oliver played Osgood in Day of the Doctor – the UNIT assistant with the Tom Baker scarf, whose combo of labcoat and asthma puffer (and scarf) made her such a darling of the cosplayers. Even having seen her play at least 12 different characters in her sketch show, including a disturbingly convincing teenage girl, I was really stunned that it was the same actress, and kept going back and forth between pictures to check.

So apparently the Chauvelin Effect is still viable even if the first thing you saw someone in is less than six months ago.

I don’t care if it never catches on with anyone else, I am totally citing this as a phenomenon in future. But next time you find out that a completely unfamiliar actor in a thing you like, turns out to be an actor you saw in something else ages ago that you totally should have remembered, you know what to call it!

Though if you decide to call it the Freddy Honeychurch Effect, I will not judge you.