Britain does not do grief by halves, but it does do it in a very particular way: a brass band, a quiet minute and a great deal of not making a fuss. Sir Patrick Stewart, who died at his Los Angeles home on 28 October aged 86, is getting the full set. At 7pm tomorrow, Tuesday 3 November, West End theatres will dim their lights for two minutes in his memory. Hannah Essex, co-chief executive of the Society of London Theatre and UK Theatre, called him “one of the greatest stage actors this country has ever seen” and “an acting giant whose seven-decade career is testament to his extraordinary talent and presence.”
Before that, the Household Division got in first. A 17-second clip shared on 30 October shows the Band of the Grenadier Guards playing a Star Trek theme in the forecourt of Buckingham Palace, the same palace where Stewart was knighted in 2010. There has been no statement from the Palace or the Army to go with it, so we cannot tell you whether the bandmaster chose Alexander Courage’s original or Jerry Goldsmith’s Next Generation arrangement; you will have to watch the clip above and argue about it in the comments, as is traditional. The Guards have form here. The Welsh Guards played “Respect” for Aretha Franklin in 2018, and in 2023 the King approved “The Best” for Tina Turner. The Changing of the Guard has quietly become the nation’s most heavily armed request show.
NASA, meanwhile, went looking for an Enterprise and found one 425 million light years away. Its Goddard Space Flight Center posted Hubble’s 2022 image of NGC 7764A, a pair of colliding galaxies that look remarkably like the starship, with the line: “History will never forget the name Captain Picard. Thank you for inspiring the Next Generation of explorers.” It is probably the only obituary tribute to come with its own redshift.
The theatre honour is the one Stewart would perhaps have prized most, because Picard was a late chapter in a life spent on stage. The boy from Mirfield made his debut at the Theatre Royal, Bristol, in 1959, joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966, and won Olivier Awards for Antony and Cleopatra in 1979 and Hamlet in 2009, along with another for his one-man A Christmas Carol. Sir Ian McKellen, who met him as a young actor at the RSC about half a century ago and later did Waiting for Godot with him on both sides of the Atlantic, remembered a proud Yorkshireman who “wore his heart on his sleeve.”
American coverage, understandably, has remembered the captain and Professor X. Britain is remembering the Shakespearean too, which seems right: few actors could have a Guards band play their TV theme on Friday and Shaftesbury Avenue go dark for them on Tuesday. We have already written our own farewell to Sir Patrick. Tomorrow at seven, if you happen to be passing a theatre, look up for a moment. Engage.
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