Oscar Winner

A friend of mine (I shall call him GP) who I sometimes met in Cardiff was a sporadic friend: someone who I'd meet one day and be greeted with a warm hand shake and a "Good to see you, come and have a drink" only to meet another day and be met with a grin of recognition and nothing said. Odd bloke was GP.
One day about twenty years ago I bumped into him outside The Model Inn and it was one of his good days - "Good to see you, come and have a drink."
So into the Model Inn we went to have a few pints and a chat.
"That broadcast you did about my stag party," he said, laughing, "that was great stuff."
I was pleased he liked it because it had been quite a scathing sort of piece about the drunkeness and general rampageousness of the party where the place in which it was held was nearly trashed (rugby players most of the party). It had been broadcast as an item in, of all things, "Woman's Hour" and it been followed by a discussion about such parties by prominent rugby players and ex-players like Cliff Morgan.
"Why don't you do more of that sort of thing - broadcasting and writing and stuff?"
I was about to answer him - to the effect that I wasn't asked to most of the time - when he jumped up and said: "This chap might help you, my uncle over there at the bar: he won an Oscar."
I said: "Huh!"
"Come over and meet him."
So I did. And indeed he had won an Oscar. Can't recall his name but he was a documentary film maker and had won his Oscar with a documentary about Dylan Thomas, one of those poetic kinds of docs. where you see the waves rolling onto the beach and a voice reads one of DT's poems - you know the sort of thing, usually boring.
But not in this case.
"What are you doing now?" I asked him.
"Preparing to make film with T.P.NcKenna," he said.
Now I have seen T.P.McKenna in a few TV plays but never in a film until a couple of days ago when I saw, for the first time, "Straw Dogs". He didn't have a big part but he made a lot of the part he had, a judge in a Cornish village full of brutish thugs. He had a tremendous air of authority about him.
I wonder if GP's uncle ever made that film. I could have done him a good script but the subject of my writing never came up; everybody wanted to talk rugby.
Never saw GP again. Heard he died. Everyone said probably of drink but I don't believe it.
In my mind's eye I still see him greeting me with a warm handshake and "Good to see you, come and have a drink", not the other character who'd pass me by with a grin of recognition.