Death in Holy Orders in 2003 and The Murder Room in 2005. After the sixth season of Judge John Deed had been filmed, Shaw appeared in the series Apparitions, broadcast by the BBC in 2008. This was Shaw's first project as executive director. From 2007 until 2017 he played the title role in the BBC TV series Inspector George Gently alongside co-star Lee Ingleby. On 9 May 2015 Shaw recited "For the Fallen" at VE Day 70: A Party to Remember in Horse Guards Parade, London which was broadcast on BBC 1. In 2021 he played the role of Dennis Stephenson, leader of a fictitious religious cult called the Barum Brethren, in the BritBox original series The Long Call. The series premiered in autumn 2021, and is based on the Ann Cleeves bestselling novel. Film Although Shaw is not classified as a film actor he has had several roles over the years. His first film role was an Irish communist in a 1967 television adaptation of the novel, Love on the Dole. Better known is his 1971 role of Banquo in Roman Polanski's Macbeth. He has also been seen as an undercover Second World War operative in the 1975 production Operation Daybreak; a singing and dancing futuristic magician "Zax" in Facelift; the role of Rachid in the 1973 film The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and a wanted villain leading a life on the run in a circus troupe in Ladder of Swords (1989). Narration and documentaries Shaw has narrated many audiobooks, including Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Silmarillion; Swift's Gulliver's Travels; and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. In 2006, Shaw narrated and appeared in a DVD chronicling the "Merlins over Malta" project. This featured the return of a Second World War Supermarine Spitfire and Hawker Hurricane from Britain to Malta for the first time in fifty years. In December 2006, Shaw presented the six-part Discovery Channel Real Time TV series Martin Shaw: Aviators, produced by Twofour, which followed the two-year restoration of his Boeing Stearman biplane after it was crashed by another pilot at Old Buckenham airfield in Norfolk. Shaw fulfilled a lifetime ambition to take the controls of a Spitfire (owned by Maurice Bayliss) and, though take-off was not permitted, he also powered an English Electric Lightning (owned by Russell Carpenter) to 150 mph in three seconds along the runway at Cranfield Airport. Shaw also compared notes with the nonagenarian