So Callan is no more.  The Equaliser is gone.  Breaker Morant is dead.  Sergeant Howie is deceased.

Edward Woodward, the RHA-trained actor, has succumbed at last to the many illnesses that beset him in his final years, and I’m sorry for his passing.  If art lies in its own concealment, Woodward was its finest exponent.  You didn’t notice him.  You didn’t notice the subtlety of his delivery as he plied his trade.

Woodward was an artist, who played many understated roles with craft and guile, but of all his his roles, I liked Callan best.

I know everyone remembers Howie in the Wicker Man, the strait-laced religious Scottish policeman who died screaming in the fire of Christopher Lee’s pagan sacrifice:  Oh Lord! Oh Jesus Christ!.  But he deserved it for rejecting Britt Ekland.  You won’t see crazed islanders setting fire to Rod Stewart.

And most people remember Breaker Morant, the stolid prisoner-killer, tried and executed by the same authorities who instructed him to murder his prisoners in a new kind of war, where a man can be shot for killing his fellow white men, though not for slaughtering Africans.  Morant knew it and laughed at the hypocrites who condemned him.

The Equaliser was beneath Woodward’s dignity, and I was sorry to see him trudge his way through its formulaic, clichéed, not-very-mean streets.  It was a come-down because, after all, this was Callan, a man who could kill with one finger.

Callan was his finest creation, a world-weary killer, fatalistic, ruthless, consummately-skilled in his filthy trade and consumed with self-aware loathing of what he was and what he did.

I liked his  cynicism. I liked his fatalistic detachment.   I liked his lack of hope. I liked his self-disgust.

Most of all, I liked that bare light-bulb.

Edward Woodward, the man who put the iconic anti-hero in a grubby gabardine, is no more, and I’m sorry to hear it.