episodes of Midsomer Murders and Lewis - in the former, appearing alongside Drop the Dead Donkey co-star Jeff Rawle; and in the latter, again playing a gambling addict alongside Haydn Gwynne, another star of Drop the Dead Donkey - and played Doug Anderson in an episode of Death in Paradise in 2013. In the Inspector George Gently episode Goodbye to China (2011), Pearson acts as a former Sergeant of DCI Gently, who now has risen in rank above his former master. In 2014 Pearson became a series regular in Waterloo Road as new headteacher Vaughan Fitzgerald. Pearson was a judge on Channel 4's The Play's the Thing, which sought to find a play written by an unknown writer for a run in the West End. The winning play, written by Kate Betts, was called On the Third Day and opened at the New Ambassadors Theatre in London in June 2006. Pearson appeared in a touring revival of Sir Peter Hall's production of Harold Pinter's Old Times in 2006, and in a production of Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia at the Duke of York's Theatre, London, in 2009. After obtaining a collection of original Hancock's Half Hour radio scripts and realising that some of the corresponding recordings no longer existed, he conceived and subsequently co-produced The Missing Hancocks, a series of re-creations of selected wiped episodes for BBC Radio 4, which debuted in October 2014. In 2020 he was in season 8, episode 4 of Father Brown. Pearson has acted in several BBC Radio Dramas including the black comedy series Vent as comatose writer Ben Smith, adaptations of the Martin Beck novels playing Beck's sidekick Detective Lennart Kollberg, and House of Ghosts: A Case for Inspector Morse where he played the late Colin Dexter's iconic fictional detective Inspector Morse. Antiquarian book business Pearson is the author of a book on the publisher Jack Kahane, Obelisk: A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press. He is a collector of rare drama scripts and in 2011 he opened an online bookshop specialising in theatrical material. He has a special interest in the expatriate literary movement of Paris between the wars. Personal interests He strongly identifies with the British Left - having made a party election broadcast for the Labour Party for the 1994 European Elections, though he later supported Ken Livingstone when Livingstone ran as an independent candidate for Mayor of London in