“Maybe I need to stop riding my bike and get very fat and eat loads of sweets and get spots and get punched in the face,” he says. “But then I might not get any work at all. Maybe I’m only getting work because of the way I look.”

Penry-Jones is best known for his character in the series Spooks, a hero so noble he died driving a car full of explosives away from a crowded square. The character he plays in Silk, showing on the ABC on Friday nights, is more towards the charming-cad end of the spectrum. He’s the ambitious barrister Clive Reader, who comes up against the working-class outsider Martha Costello (played by Maxine Peake).

Penry-Jones says Clive was born with a silver spoon, one of “these boys who had gone from Harrow with its beautiful cloistered walls to Oxford or Cambridge with their cloistered walls and then into the law courts".

"Some of these boys just live in cloisters all their lives. People seem to offer me those kind of parts a lot. I suppose the writer knew I could do that class thing and maybe bring a bit of humour to it. I thought he was a bit more of a nob than I wanted him to be, so I tried to make him a little less nob-like, if you know what I mean. I made my point to the writer and the producers and they agreed. If you set him up as too much of an idiot, you can’t understand why somebody like Martha would ever be interested in him.”

In the early episodes, Clive Reader was pretty ruthless, but Penry-Jones refuses to call him a villain. “He will do whatever it takes to win – if that means treading on the toes of his best friend or someone he loves, he will still do it. That’s the difference between the two characters: she’s eaten up with all the moral decisions she has to make, whereas Clive just does his job and moves on.

“In the third series he starts to soften up, and he’s looking after Martha a lot more. He can see that she’s spinning out and he tries to keep an eye on her, and try and help her.”

Penry-Jones is disappointed the BBC has not renewed Silk for a fourth season, but at least this will open the door for more challenging work for him: “I’ve never completely transformed myself for a role; I’d like to be given the opportunity.”

When we spoke, he’d just been offered the part of an artist named Duncan Grant in a miniseries called Life in Squares, about the Bloomsbury Group bohemians of the 1920s. “He was a brilliant artist who was openly homosexual," says Penry-Jones. "He was very sensitive, softly spoken, quite deep. I’m still working him out at the moment. I’m reading books to try to get my head around him. He was dark-haired so I’ll get to be dark instead of a blondie this time at least. It’s going to be an exciting journey.”

Silk airs on Fridays at 9.30pm on ABC.

Great lawyer shows before Silk

The 1950s: Perry Mason. Perry (Raymond Burr) was the pioneer, on Australian TV almost from its first week, and always on the right side.

The '60s: The Defenders. Father and son team Lawrence and Kenneth Preston (E. G. Marshall and Robert Reed, later the dad in The Brady Bunch) confronted issues such as abortion, racism and capital punishment, and sometimes lost.

The '70s: Rumpole of the Bailey. Horace Rumpole (Leo McKern) was addicted to red wine and steak and kidney pudding, and specialised in getting minor villains off major charges.

The '80s: Carson’s Law. Jennifer Carson (Lorraine Bayly) was the Janet King of her time – often too honourable for her own good.

The '90s: Ally McBeal. Ally McBeal (Calista Flockhart) was a ditz, but managed to win more than she lost. She made dancing babies a web fad before kittens.

The noughties: Boston Legal. Alan Shore (James Spader) and Denny Crane (William Shatner) were naughty boys who battled over principles and greed.

The teens: Rake. Cleaver Greene (Richard Roxburgh) was at risk of giving lawyers a bad name.

The perfect match?

Not that this column would have any truck with celebrity gossip, but I can’t resist passing on one more detail about Rupert Penry-Jones: He used to go out with Kylie Minogue.

The subject came up when we were discussing how accent is an indicator of class in Britain, while it isn’t in Australia. “We think of the Australian class system as being similar to the American class system, which is more about money than anything else,” Penry-Jones said. “In Britain, it’s not just about money. A lot of people who have that accent don’t have any money.”

But he questioned my assertion that the Australian accent is pretty uniform: “In Australia you do have two sorts of accents – there’s the Kath and Kim accent and there’s a posher Australian; a thick accent and a slightly more Anglophile one.”

His awareness of the way we speak does not come from experience on this continent. It comes from time spent with Kylie Minogue in 1999. “We did The Tempest together in Barbados,” he revealed. “I was Ferdinand and she was Miranda. She was very good, absolutely lovely, one of the nicest people I have ever met.”

Penry-Jones is now married to the Irish actress Dervla Kirwan (Ballykissangel), and they have two children.

Another test of character

You can rate the memorability of a character by the number of adjectives that arise as soon as you think about him or her. Thus an outpouring such as this – “selfish, vain, dishonest and manipulative, but as charismatic as Hitler or Stalin” – would pretty much guarantee a person a spot in any list of “the best characters on TV right now”.

So would this: “a magnificent, witty, vibrant, crazy, reckless kind of super hero who is a great champion for women’s rights and people in less fortunate situations ... she’s a lover and a fighter”.

Those are only the beginning of the things you could say about, in the first case, Ja’mie King, and in the second case, Phryne Fisher (the description came from Essie Davis, who plays her).

Yes, yes, I know both shows have not been on the box this year, so “right now” is not technically accurate. But allow me the latitude of including characters whose series have been shown in the past 12 months or will return in the next 12 months. Those were the parameters established by the US showbiz bible Entertainment Weekly when it published the list that inspired my effort.

EW recently covered “The 25 best characters on TV right now”, and they were, naturally enough, all Americans. Last week this column asked for your suggestions on Australian characters deserving of equal recognition. This is the list we came up with:

1 Billie Proudman (Kat Stewart in Offspring)

2 Alice Ross-King (Georgia Flood in Anzac Girls)

3 The Micallef persona (Shaun Micallef in Mad As Hell).

4 Elizabeth Bligh (Noni Hazlehurst in A Place To Call Home).

5 Ja’mie King (Chris Lilley in Ja’mie: Private School Girl).

6 The politician (John Clarke in Clarke and Dawe)

7 Josh (Josh Thomas in Please Like Me)

8 Gemma Crabb (Julia Morris in House Husbands)

9 Caroline Tivoli (Claudia Karvan in The Time of Our Lives)

10 Phryne Fisher (Essie Davis in Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries)

You’re probably wondering what Shaun Micallef is doing there. Isn’t he a real person? Answer: The Micallef you see in Mad As Hell (and in Newstopia, Talking Bout Your Generation and Micallef Tonight) is an invention. At least we hope the real Micallef is not much like the pompous, obsessive, mischievous, fussy, cowardly talk-show host. By contrast, it would be nice to think the Micallef persona’s old sparring partner (or punching bag) Josh Thomas is like the sweet character known as Josh in Please Like Me.

The inclusion of John Clarke may be puzzling. Every Thursday night at the end of 7.30 he is interviewed by Brian Dawe in a traditional current affairs format. Clarke might be introduced as Joe Hockey, Wayne Swan, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull or Julia Gillard, but he doesn’t impersonate them. In the end, they are all the same character, whom we might dub The Politician – evasive, smarmy, disingenuous, patronising, hypocritical and totally devoid of self-doubt.

So a character does not have to be likeable to make our list. Elizabeth Bligh is a racist snob. But she’s also capable of reflection, and by the premature end of A Place To Call Home, she had learnt and changed.

Daffy sister Billie Proudman, helicopter mother Caroline Tivoli and jealous third wife Gemma Crabb can be annoying and self-destructive, but because of the way they are written and played we can understand them and enjoy them.

You may not yet have seen enough of Alice Ross-King to judge whether she should join this select company, so you’re going to have to trust me. Over the five episodes of Anzac Girls I’ve seen, she evolves from a flirtatious youngster to a thoughtful, determined, charismatic woman. The process is fascinating to watch, and that’s what makes a character great.

To discuss, write to thetribalmind@gmail.com or see smh.com.au/entertainment/blog/the-tribal-mind.

Great lawyer shows before Silk.

The 50s: Perry Mason. Perry (Raymond Burr) was the pioneer, on Australian TV almost from its first week, and always on the right side.

The 60s:  The Defenders. Father and son team Lawrence and Kenneth Preston (E. G. Marshall and Robert Reed, later the dad in The Brady Bunch) confronted issues such as abortion, racism and capital punishment, and sometimes lost.

The 70s: Rumpole of the Bailey. Horace Rumpole (Leo McKern) was addicted to red wine and steak and kidney pudding, and specialised in getting minor villains off major charges.

The 80s: Carson’s Law. Jennifer Carson (Lorraine Bayly) was the Janet King of her time – often too honourable for her own good.

The 90s: Ally McBeal. Ally McBeal (Calista Flockhart) was a ditz, but managed to win more than she lost. She made dancing babies  a web fad before kittens.

The Noughties: Boston Legal. Alan Shore (James Spader) and Denny Crane (William Shatner) were naughty boys who battled over principles and greed.

The Teens: Rake. Cleaver Greene (Richard Roxburgh) was at risk of giving lawyers a bad name.

For more details, go to http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/blog/the-tribal-mind