The following is an interview with John from the TV Times Magazine dated June 14, 1974, about newlyweds John & Sheila moving into their new home. The photos that originally accompanied this artcile are posted in the Visitor's Gallery, Part 5. (Article courtesy of Janet).
The following is the most recent interview Sheila Hancock has given about John and her life without him. The interview comes to us courtesy of Janet.
LIFE'S LESSONS by Sheila Hancock (Information from Saga Magazine December 2003, article courtesy of Leila Poole) - Sheila Hancock is back on television this Christmas in Bedtime with Timothy West. A year after the death of her husband, actor John Thaw, she is writing a memoir of their marriage. She has been on stage and screen for more than 50 years, in productions ranging from Titus Andronicus to the Carry On films. Bright, talkative and witty, she is a favourite TV guest Now 70, she draws strength from the Quaker religion, she tells Valerie Grove.
WHAT MAKES JOHN THAW FREEZE? Gordon Gow discovers ‘The Sweeney’ star’s greatest fear – CLAUSTROPHOBIA (Information from Photoplay Magazine, August 1978, article courtesy of Leila Poole) - Tough is the word for John Thaw – or at any rate for the John Thaw the world knows best, the John Thaw so firmly identified with his popular, forceful role of Detective Inspector Regan of The Sweeney.
THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD OF JOHN THAW from the Manchester News , Saturday, Feb. 23, 2002 (article courtesy of Janet) - He was known to millions as one of the country’s best-loved actors, but to a former Manchester market porter, John Thaw is still remembered as the shy young lad who sold fruit and veg.
CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION - Saturday March 1, 2003, The Guardian (article courtesy of Leila Poole) - Abigail Thaw, 37, is a mother and actor. She was raised in London by her mother, Sally Alexander, who was at the forefront of feminist activism and thought in the 1970s and 1980s, taking part in the infamous flour-bombing of the 1970 Miss World contest; she is now a professor of modern history at Goldsmiths College. Abigail's father was the actor John Thaw.
MY VIEW - by Peter Genower, Editor In Chief Tv Times Magazine, July 1, 2001 (article courtesy of Janet) - It came as a real shock to us here at TVTimes…..And in the week which sees the final episode of his series The Glass, the news that actor John Thaw is suffering from cancer of the oesophagus will have touched his millions of fans around the country. It must have been a particularly cruel blow as John's father died of cancer only three years ago, and his wife, actress Sheila Hancock, successfully won her personal struggle with breast cancer back in the late Eighties. I've known John Thaw since he first starred as a slim, raw-looking, crew-cutted 22-year-old in a series called Redcap on ITV in 1964. He's always been a fascinating man; a mixture of matter-of-fact gruffness and bloody-mindedness, all overlaid with great warmth, generosity, and love of life. But essentially he's a born fighter, the kind of man who really relishes a challenge. John has said, understandably, that he wants privacy for himself and his family while he undergoes intensive treatment, and that he's determined to get back to work as soon as he's fit. I know that I speak for his millions of fans when I wish him well in the battle ahead. If I know John Thaw, he'll be back soon - and we still have a lot to see of the finest TV actor of a generation.
"I'VE DONE IT, I'VE EARNED MY SPURS" - from TV Times magazine, March 9-15, 2002 (article courtesy of Janet.) This week, as a tribute to John Thaw, ITV1 will be screening repeats of Kavanagh QC (Saturday) and Goodnight Mister Tom (Sunday), as well as continuing the Morse repeats. Writer Pam Francis interviewed John many times for TvTimes. Here, she gives her personal impression of the much-missed star:
RADIO TIMES TRIBUTE TO JOHN THAW - (Feb.28, 2002) by Alison Graham (article courtesy of Janet) - The death of John Thaw at too young an age - he was 60 - has saddened all of us at Radio Times, just as I know it has our readers. To all his great roles - Jack Regan in The Sweeney, Morse and Kavanagh - he brought a unique combination of vulnerability and intelligence. But it was probably his modesty and detachment from the celebrity circus that made him such a favourite. He clearly hated being interviewed. When our man Andrew Duncan asked to see him back in 1994, his wife Sheila Hancock warned him: "He's very shy - he finds it difficult to be on show." Duncan did eventually meet up with the actor, for the start of Kavanagh QC, and was told: "What I do isn't earthshattering. I just want to entertain someone who comes home from a hard day's work, puts on the telly to relax and maybe forgets the gas bill for an hour. That's what I'm about." Our television editor Alison Graham remembers John Thaw in a special tribute that follows the letters page.
A NEW KIND OF BRIEF ENCOUNTER - Radio Times Magazine, April 24-30 2004 (article courtesy of Janet) - John Thaw is a very hard act to follow, but Alan Davies has been persuaded to try by the makers of Kavanagh QC.
Next: Articles & Interviews (Pt.10)
On Saturday you can see John Thaw in the new comedy series, Thick As Thieves. Here, you see him with his wife, Sheila Hancock moving house...
With a mixture of surprise and satisfaction in his voice, actor John Thaw says: "I always seem to end up in television series. I don't know why. I never consciously look for that sort of work; it just seems to turn up."
Last Saturday saw the start of Thick As Thieves, a new comedy series, in which he stars with Pat Ashton and Bob Hoskins. "Basically," says Thaw, "it's about a guy who comes out of prison to find that his best mate - that's me - is living with his wife. All the fun starts from there."
In real life 32-year-old John Thaw has been married to actress Sheila Hancock - 10 years his senior - since last December. They have just moved, after weeks of frenzied preparation, into a large house in South London, which has been stripped, gutted and redecorated throughout. The décor is clearly Sheila's choice, with its swirling, brightly-coloured wallpaper designs and very feminine bedrooms.
"I enjoyed the move," she says, sounding as though she means it. "Looking back on my life I think I've moved about every five years or so. I enjoy clearing everything out and starting again, and it's a good excuse to have a purge and throw out things like old love letters. The only trouble is that we've just come back from holiday and we're now so exhausted that we need another one. But with carpets to buy I don't see us going away again for quite some time."
John is much more vehement about the whole operation, declaring bitterly: "I've made a vow never to move again for the rest of my life. It took three days before we could even find somewhere to sit."
But the couple certainly need the extra space in their new house, for this is the second marriage for both of them, and they each have a young daughter. Sheila's daughter, 10-year-old Melanie Jane, lives with them, and eight-year-old Abigail, John's daughter, is a frequent visitor. And now Sheila is expecting another child. "I hope it's a boy this time," says Thaw. "I can't quite get used to living with a house full of women. It's particularly strange for me because I was bought up in an all-male household with just my father and younger brother - my mother left when I was about five years old."
John Thaw's father was a lorry driver in Manchester, and it was there that John spent the first 16 years of his life. Learning did not appeal to him very much, and he left school as soon as possible to go to work in a local fruit market. "I was paid a pittance for getting up at four o'clock every morning and working through to two o'clock in the afternoon. No one told me that my employers were the hardest-working, lowest-paying people in the market. Eventually I got fed up and went to work for a master baker."
Since leaving school John had been an active member of a local youth club and he now began to do turns as a stand-up comic. "I managed to make people laugh but I would hate, at this stage of the game, to see the things I did. It would be horribly embarrassing."
However, it give him the taste for acting and entertaining, and, encouraged by the teacher at the youth club, John decided to head for London to become an actor. He auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and was given a place at the early age of 16. "With the arrogance of youth it never occurred to me that I wouldn't get in."
In his last year at R.A.D.A. John won the Liverpool Prize, which carried an immediate contract with the Liverpool Repertory Company. From there he went straight into his first series for Granada Television, and he has rarely been out of work since. "I realise that I'm one of the lucky ones. Talent has very little to do with it really. There are lots of talented actors around without work, simply because at any one time, there are only jobs for about 20 per cent of them. That's one reason why I'm happy to be doing a series."
He has, of course, done other things as well, including Competition, a play in the Armchair Theatre series, in which he acted opposite Michael Jayston. "I found John Thaw very jokey to work with," says Jayston. "I remember we had to recite a long speech to each other, and we absolutely refused to discuss it beforehand because we knew that we would just go to pieces and never be able to do it at all."
But John has his serious side, particularly where acting is concerned. Although he has been fortunate, his experience within the profession has made him determined to dissuade his daughter, Abigail, from following in his footsteps.
"It's bad enough for an actor," he says, "but actresses have a hell of a time. There are more of them for a start, and far fewer parts to go round. I've seen too much of what it can do to girls to want my daughter to be any part of it."
He does find, however, that there are some advantages in being married to an actress. "People always say how difficult it is for two actors to live together, and in many ways it is. But at least we can share the problems and understand the pressures and the demands it makes on you."
"My first wife was nothing to do with the profession and I think it was difficult for her to understand when I came home shattered at the end of a day's filming or rehearsing. It's hard to explain to someone who doesn't actually know what it's like."
Thaw spends little of his spare time in the cinema, preferring the theatre and, most of all, the opera. Music is his real passion, so much so that one of the rooms in his new house has been set aside as a music room with sophisticated hi-fi equipment and a huge collection of records.
"I like almost everything, but I have a bias towards classical music," he says. "My one regret is that I can't play it myself."
John Thaw and Sheila Hancock are anxious to keep their private and professional lives separate. They have decided never to give interviews together, and rarely appear in the same photograph.
"We don't want to become a two-some in the eyes of the public," Thaw says. "We each have our own careers to follow, and it would be quite wrong for people to link our names all the time."
WE REALLY GRUMPED OUR WAY THROUGH LIFE - Tuesday March 23, 2004, the Guardian -
Sheila Hancock talks to Simon Hattenstone about her new life as a partygoer, why she likes young men and why - two years after his death - she will always miss her husband John Thaw:
'God, I'm hung over," Sheila Hancock says, squinting into the light. We meet in her library. Well, not her library. It's the library of the women's club she belongs to in central London - all antique wood, books piled sky high, and cerebral women chatting quietly. You're supposed to have a degree for membership, but they told Hancock that she'd done so many splendid things with her life that they'd make an exception for her.
Hancock is famous in three ways: as a wonderful, tender actor; as an outspoken campaigner against injustice; and as the wife of the real-life Inspector Morse. Her relationship with John Thaw was thunderous and obsessive. Six weeks after he died two years ago, she talked of her devastation, and said she was feeling worse and worse as the days dragged on. But today she's smiling through her hangover.
She is back acting in the BBC's kiddy blockbuster Feather Boy as a semi-deranged old bat and she has almost finished her biography of Thaw (which doubles as autobiography). She says she knew little about Thaw's childhood so did heaps of research and interviewed childhood friends. She'd be good at the journalist thing - she is a natural communicator, and has been reading the Guardian forensically aÒll her adult life. In our first five minutes, she gives a synopsis of everything we've published in the past decade.
"You're a Man City fan, aren't you?" she says out of the blue. How d'you know? "Oh, something you wrote. John transferred from City to United after the Munich air crash. His dad hated him for it. I mean, he adored his son, but in that area he spat venom. John's brother is seriously ill in Australia. He's a City fan. I emailed him after the United match and said surely now you're feeling better, and he emailed back saying, 'I can face anything now.' “Her brother-in-law, almost inevitably, has cancer. Thaw and her first husband, the actor Alec Ross, both died of cancer of the oesophagus; Hancock herself recovered from breast cancer.
She takes a headache pill and apologises. Why is she so hung over? It's a long story, she says. "It's sort of linked with this club in a way. I had a dear friend called Clare Venables, who brought me here for lunch - first time I came here. Clare died last year, and while she was dying at the hospice she ran the whole thing rather like a soiree and she kept introducing friends to other friends. I think she had been a bit worried about me because I was a bit sad at the time, so she introduced me to two young people, and I knew her son, of course. And last night was Clare's birthday, so we went up to Stratford and had a knees-up at the Tavern restaurant and I drank too much." It's such a rarity getting well and truly sloshed, she says with relish. And how did she feel? "Great, actually."
You've always seemed a bit laddish, I say. She gives me a look. "It depends what laddish is. It's a very modern word. What is laddish?" Well, the jags and the speed and the macho stuff, I whimper pathetically. "Uhmmmm ... I do like transport," she concedes. And speed? "I do quite, I do." She admits that she once did 150mph in her Jag XKR, but that was while testing her limits for the advanced driving test. She pauses, before splurging into confession.
"When John gave me my first Jag, I was quite an aggressive driver. I was very rude to people, shouted a lot, fuck off, at traffic lights," - she waves two demonic fingers in my direction - "and he said, if you're going to have a car like this you're a positive danger." Thaw is a permanent presence - grumpy, loving, belligerent, amusing, amused. "We used to drive down to our house in France, and we were late, and John was chugging along and I said, 'Look, we're never going to get there, let me drive,' and he was white with fear, and afterwards he said, 'I will never do that again.' "
In some ways Hancock is so confident. Yet she has often talked about her vulnerabilities - her fear of live performance, her sense of her own physical plainness. You're a weird mix of the fearless and petrified, I say. She smiles. "Yes, I think I am. Quite frightened is the dominant thing." She laughs. "I think why I'm sometimes fearless is because I've found, and this comes with age, if you challenge something your fear goes away."
Hancock reminds me of Alice, the character she plays in the television series Bedtime - no-nonsense, superficially conventional, deeply moral, and burning with a great radical soul. "Yes, there's a lot of me in it - the sort of campaigning thing and always fucking it up." She talks of the time that she and her screen husband Timothy West were mercilessly slagging off their daughters, and says that the thing she loves about Alice is her capacity for vileness. Is there a lot of her in that? "Oh, yes! Ooh God, yes! That's one of the reasons I miss John more than anything, because I can't slag off my daughters. Who do I slag them off to now?" And she looks distraught. One daughter is from their marriage, one from her first marriage and one from Thaw's first marriage - all three are actors.
Who was the biggest slagger? "We were equal slaggers. We really did grump our way through life. I do miss that terribly because he was a great slagger, John. He really was very funny."
Does she think irascibility kept them together? "Probably, yes. Yes," she giggles in her girly-sexy voice. "I'm doing that marvellous programme Grumpy Old Men, but now it's Grumpy Old Women. My list is endless." Go on, then. "Cyclists. Unbelievable! They're mad . And those Lycra trousers! I mean, purleeeeze. " Anything else? "CD covers. Absurd." She looks at Eamonn, the photographer. "Having my photograph taken."
Well you may be an A1 grump, but you're also an idealist aren't you? "Oh, absolutely. That's why I'm grumpy all the time. Absolutely. Because your ideal never happens. Nothing ever goes right. But the thing about getting older is that you do accept it." Which makes her grumpy all over again. But if she accepted it all, she wouldn't campaign like she does. "Well, yes," she grumbles, "but I'm grumpy to less effect now. I don't wave banners as much as I used to."
Thaw used to tell her she had a Messiah complex. Was that fair? "Yes, I think so. I always thought it was down to me. I think that's something my dad gave me, that you have a huge responsibility. After the war, when all the Belsen thing and all that came out, I remember my dad saying, 'It's up to your generation to see that that never happens again.' It had a deep impression on me. But I carry it to an absurd degree. That's what John used to object to."
When she worked as a director, she always thought it was her responsibility to sort out her actors' personal problems. "John said, 'They'll sort their lives out, it's not down to you.' Which is true. A lot of the time you do those things and the motivation is to make yourself feel better. So I have to watch that." She has never been easy on herself.
Hancock recently played a mischievous gay businesswoman in the TV series FortySomething. I remind her of something she said years ago - that she prefers the company of women and could quite happily be a lesbian, but she'd miss the sex. "Well, that's probably true." She stops, and has a rethink. "No, I quite like men actually. And I like younger men now." Perhaps she always preferred the younger man - Thaw was almost 10 years her junior. "It's wonderful to be with people of a younger generation. it really is. Like last night ... I do occasionally worry that I get the sympathy vote. I was going to make a phone call tonight and say, 'Listen, are you just tolerating an old fart on the quiet?' "
Nowadays she accepts all social invitations. It's so different from life with Thaw. "I was very reclusive with John. This is a whole new me, this social animal. In fact, I gave a party. John had been dead for two years, and my children said come on, get your act together, so I had a party." Thaw died a day before her birthday. Yes, she says, it does make her slightly reluctant to celebrate, but she is 71 and she would be bloody lucky if she had not lost people along the way. "You know, life is about loss and recovering and starting again. It gets a bit more difficult to start again the older you get. But you can do it, you can do it."
I ask her if she thinks she is through with grieving. "No, I don't think I ever will be. But also generally I grieve for the world. I don't see how you can possibly be 100% happy. I never have been and I know I never will. I think modern society is geared to thinking you are entitled to be happy, and it's such a shock when horrid things happen, but if you take it that life is really a test - you know, a test to see if you can get through it - then it's all right, and then when you do have joyful moments, like last night, with these kids, you think, yeah, how lucky I am."
She looks great - tall and elegant, and dishier than she was in her younger days. I ask her if lots of men have propositioned her since Thaw died. "Ach, don't be silly, darling. At my age I should be so lucky. No, no, no. Darling, it's very sweet of you to even suggest that it would be possible, but it wouldn't. I very much regret that I probably won't have another man in my life because I like men, and I've always had men in my life. And I miss that terribly. Terribly miss it. I like a little fella."
Perhaps we could put an ad at the bottom of the piece for the perfect man, I suggest. No point, she says. "I'm not saying it was the perfect relationship, because it wasn't, but when you've had somebody you've been obsessed with, as I was, it is very difficult to replace it, it really is."
Was Thaw equally obsessed with her? "I think so." That's pretty amazing to find such mutual love in life, I say. "It is," she says quietly. "It is."
KEVIN WHATELY AS YOU'VE NEVER SEEN HIM BEFORE - (8/26/03) - "The Legend Of The Tamworth Two" - STARRING Kevin Whately, Gerard Horan, Emma Pierson, Darren Boyd, Alexei Sayle and John Sessions. With the voices of Frances Barber and Brian Blessed. FILMED Sept 5th - 16th 2003, 90 Minutes, released BBC Christmas 2003. SYNOPSIS: In January 1998, two wild boar piglets hit the headlines after escaping from the abattoir when being unloaded. The two piglets named Butch and Sundance evaded police, press, RSPCA, and members of the public for several weeks while hiding out in overgrowths and woods. The adventure did come to an end when the piglets were finally caught and luckily bought by the Daily Mail. They ended up at the Kent Animal Sanctuary, where they will spend the rest of their days.
BACKGROUND: The two pigs which caused a media frenzy in the UK after they escaped on the
way to an abattoir are to have their life stories told in a family movie.
The pigs, dubbed the Tamworth Two, went on the run for a week after making a
dash for it in 1998 as they were unloaded from an abattoir lorry. The story
of Butch and Sundance dominated the headlines and when they were finally
caught they were saved from becoming pork chops, and given a new protected
home to live out their days. Now the BBC is making a 90-minute movie about
their adventure called The Legend of the Tamworth Two, in the mould of the
successful Babe films. The film will use real pigs, whose actions will be
enhanced by computer technology to give them more human characteristics, and
voiced by actors. Actress Lucy Davies, star of The Office sitcom and
daughter of Jasper Carrott, will provide the voice for Sundance, while Ryan
Cartwright of The Grimleys will voice Butch. Frances Barber will play the
pigs' mother, and Brian Blessed will be a wild boar who inspires Butch to
make a break for it and to avoid capture. The two pigs which caused a media frenzy after they escaped on the way to an abattoir are to have their life stories told in a family movie, in the mould of the successful Babe films.
Executive producer Sally Woodward told BBC News Online: "The film tells how the story of Butch and Sundance became a legend, of how Britain once again took the underdog to their hearts - or in this instance, the under-pig - and in the process briefly made them the most famous fugitives in the world".
"It also shows how contrary human beings are in their relationship with animals - how we are only too happy to tuck in to a pork chop, but are outraged when we want to capture a pig that has stolen our heart."
The Tamworth Two escaped from a slaughterhouse in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, where they had been sent by owner, and evaded capture for a week. Butch was the first to be found, while Sundance had to be brought down with a tranquiliser dart by vets. Their owner received many offers above their market price to save their bacon, and eventually the Daily Mail newspaper bought them and paid for them to stay at the Rare Breeds Centre, near Ashford, Kent, where they live in "Tamworth Towers".
It’s possible to win no prizes at all in life and still succeed. When I got my scholarship to Rada, at 16, it was like a finishing school. I came from King’s Cross and Bexley Heath, had a cockney accent and didn’t fit in with the Vivien Leigh look. In those days they gave prizes for everything, for grace, and charm, and the way you moved, and I was the only person in my year who won nothing. But I think I’m the only woman who’s still working.
You overcome your looks. I never thought I could be a star with my appearance. My fellow student Diane Cilento was a sort of beautiful version of me. Later, when I did Rattle of a Simple man, she got my part in the film. I wrote in my diary “A bit sad about Diane dong the film but what do you expect with my face?”
I used to say, when I was young, that I was only in our business for the sex and coffee breaks. Now it’s just for the coffee breaks. When I’m in a long run the only thing that gets me there is to see the other actors. I’d hate to do a one-woman show, go alone into an echoing theatre and have nobody to talk to backstage.
Eight Years of weekly rep left me with an agile memory. The tricks and tools I learnt for memorising lines still work for me, even for the long monologues of Andy Hamilton’s Bedtime, the TV I’m doing this Christmas. I did the first series shortly after John died and it was good discipline.
I resist the labels of ‘widow’ and ‘cancer victim’. But it is difficult when tragic things keep happening around me: my first husband, and now John, have died of cancer, I had breast cancer 13 years ago and then my grandson Jack had a brain tumour. That was the closest I have come to not being able to cope. We faced what thousands of people have to through, only more publicly. But it’s been a struggle.
I’ve learnt to curb my campaigning spirit. John called it my Messiah complex. CND marches, prison reform, the soup run for the homeless, the Open University, adult literacy, the hospice movement. I spread myself too thinly, wanting to love and to be good. I think that’s how I got ill. There’s such a lack of compassion in society. I always believed we could make the world perfect. But there comes a time when you’ve had enough of the martyr role. I’ve certainly had enough. When my agent gets a call for me to do something for yet another cancer charity, I have to say I am sick to death of cancer. It’s become unbearable.
We must all tell our mothers we admire them. I regretted having grown away from my mother, but as she was dying of Hodgkin’s disease we came back together; I nursed her and we were very close. But her generation didn’t talk easily about emotions.
We need to draw attention to the under-representation of older women in the stage and screen. Just as older women are overlooked in life. I’m determined to shout my mouth off about it. But I’ve met so many splendid women, often in their nineties – intelligent, enlightened, witty. I’m lucky to be offered some sparkly older roles. I’ve even had an offer from the Royal Court with a sex scene in it.
I learnt from the actress Athene Seyler that at a certain age you can stop a boring conversation with “I’m terribly old now and I have to leave.” I even say it to my children.
I used to be mystified by young women’s lack of a work ethic, or feminism, but I now see they know how to enjoy themselves. They’re not driven. Instead they prioritise enjoyment and time with their children. I was different: if a job came along, my children were dragged by the scruffs of their necks and dumped on my mother. I now realise it was silly; I could have done without the job and had more fun with them.
You have to be open to being proven wrong. Being a lefty, I am amazed to find I have come to love country women. Filming in Wiltshire recently, I met the owner of the house, a widow. On her desk was her open diary, and everything in it was public service: Parish council, WI, and so on. She was a pillar of society, salt on the earth.
An actress learns that to empathise with a role, you need to study people and shed your preconceptions. I played a countess in The Buccaneers. On location at Castle Howard, I would normally feel “Bloody landed gentry, can’t stand toffs.” But I met these amazing women whose lives were dedicated to the local villages and the care of their staff. They lived in a tiny wing of the house with people thronging through. I really respect them.
In spite of all the great changes that have happened, we are still living in a male-dominated society. I pestered Trevor Nunn to make me Artistic Director of the RSC touring company – but I found battling with RSC’s male hierarchy very onerous. Meetings (with all that “speaking through the chair.”) went on late, geared for the guys, while I had to get back to the babysitter. And on the drama of the Arts Council, any idea I proposed would be minuted as having come from one of the men.
Older people need to master the internet. I will never stop wanting to learn new things. I feel almost in a panic of curiosity.
I learnt doing Have I got News For you and Just a Minute on radio, never to try to compete with the funny boys. Play the game, but if you don’t have a stand up act, just be a foil for them, or you’ll get eaten alive.
It’s a cliché, but grandchildren are much nicer than children. I spoil mine utterly: I am not responsible for their personalities, and I am sick of discipline. I don’t clean their teeth. They’re an enchantment and keep you young. I do love going on seesaws and roundabouts when the Carters Steam Fair comes to town. And hour could I, at 70, go on my own.
Never assume that other people have lots of friends. After John died everybody assumed I’d have lots of companions, but I didn’t, because John was a very reclusive man: he didn’t want anyone but me. So I did feel a bit cut off and lonely, and had to make new friends. I thought I’d never go to a concert again, but a lovely new friend, the producer, Richard Digby Day, comes with me: a totally new experience because he’s so musically knowledgeable.
I’m still learning how to enter a room on my own. From my Dad to my first husband to my second husband, I’ve always had a man around. This week I went to a party at the National and going upstairs I met the designer Bob Crowley and asked him to hold my hand. But I always had John’s hand in mine. We thought we were going off into the sunset together.
Don’t ever expect life to be smooth and happy. Most lived involve hard slog and rejection. Life is a hill we must climb. I’m lucky to have a job I love, a family, financial security. But a thinking person knows that even while you are having a wonderful time, other’s lives are made up of suffering.
It’s been a slow process of discovery but I’ve come to find deep peace and comfort in the Quaker religion. When I had cancer I became an atheist. I was bored with faith. I’d watched three loved ones die and I couldn’t be bothered to ask why there was such suffering. But facing the fact that I might die, I needed something more uplifting then music. I went off on a quest. I went to an ashram in High Wycombe, I tried Buddhism, I’d done meditation, but felt silly with anything of an Eastern Flavour. But as soon as I went to the Friends Meeting House, I felt, this is for me. I had known Quakers before – The Quaker headmistress of my grammar school dealt with me with such shrewdness when I was wayward; and at Greenham Common, where the Quakers stood in a silent circle; I was impressed with their potency. So I started going to meetings, and felt at home. I loved the silences.
I love everything Quakers stand for. They are open minded, not rigid or hierarchical or male orientated or homophobic. Quaker have been at the forefront of progress in medicine and charity, and their objectives are ones I quite like to strive for. And it’s such a lovely comforting thing to be silent once a week.
“Consider that you might be wrong” and “Live adventurously” are two bits of advice from the Quakers’. There is no creed. They have no ultimate answer. I like that. Meetings are full of wide older women like my headmistress; with a word they can calm you. And they are not insular; they are involved in the world at large. They accept everyone, and they do not evangelise. When Jack was ill and I was terribly distraught, the Quaker meeting said, “let’s think of Jack” – and I swear something powerful happened in that meeting. And when John died, we had a Quaker meeting at our house for closest friends and family, who were told to bring a poem if they wanted. I’ve only recently learnt the solace of poetry. When John was alive, we thought poetry a bit odd: you either got actors “elocuting” or even more irritatingly, that float lifeless Liverpool delivery that denies it’s a poem at all. And when John died, many well-meaning people sent me that awful poem Death is nothing at all. But then someone sent me Edna St Vincent Millay’s “Time does not being relief; you all have lied/who told me time would ease me of my pain” and I thought: That’s exactly how I feel.
Having Breast Cancer did teach me to make the most of whatever time I have left. To savour life, give myself time to look at sunsets.
Yet beneath this rough-hewn surface, John Thaw is a man who knows fear, like many others. His prime dread is of being shut in – trapped in a confined space. It’s a terror that gives him nightmares.
He knows how it originated, too. In fact he remembers that cause quite vividly.
“It was the most horrific experience I’ve ever had in my life.” He told me. “It happened when I was acting in the film Dr. Phibes Rises Again. The character I played was killed and there was a scene with the body just lying there, for which they wanted to make a death mask of me."
“The way they do this is complicated. First they pit cotton wool in your ears and two straws up your nose – one up each nostril, so that you’ll be able to breathe, hopefully, during what follows. Then they cover your face all over with stuff like dentists use when they’re taking an impression of someone’s gums in order to make false teeth – red, gooey stuff like plasticine. Imagine your face obliterated by that, totally. "
“But that’s not all, by any means. On top of it they put plaster of Paris. Then you have to wait for that to set. They told me it would take about a quarter of an hour. Well, after about five minutes I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. I was going berserk."
“I started scratching at all this thick wet stuff on my face and trying to shout to them but all that came out was a kind of moan through the plaster. They couldn’t hear what I was trying to say but they go the general idea, because I could feel their hands patting me on the shoulder and I could their voices – very, very distant on account of the wool in my ears – calling out “It will be alright.”
“But I wasn’t all right as far as I was concerned. I couldn’t stand it. I began ripping the mask off, but of course it didn’t come away and at last they had to cut it off."
“And ever since that day I’ve been claustrophobic. I can’t get into a crowned lift. I can’t go into any room or any kind of space where there’s lots of people or where I feel there’s not sufficient air."
“And even now. I have these dreams about it sometimes. Lying in bed at night the memory comes back to me that suffocating feeling. That was far, far more frightening than anything I’ve ever done on the Sweeney.”
Nevertheless the rigours of his screen life as Regan are occasionally on the horrific side as well. The Flying Squad is the only chauffeur driven police force in the world. And when we’re doing some of the those car stunts I have to sit there as if, to me as Regan, it’s all in the days work, but actually I’m frightened – to say the least.”
So the toughness and apparent calm in the face of imminent collision are to acting of no small order – and John Thaw’s unfrightened face is an important factor in the realism of The Sweeney. This realism, in fact, has earned the approval of real life cops.
“I go to a lot of Police functions and I have some close friends who are policemen.” Says John. “Mind you, they do have their criticisms from time to time. A Flying Squad officer said to me once “Sometimes it takes us three days to get a man to admit his own name, whereas you solve a case in sixty minutes. But generally they’re pleased. They like The Sweeney because it shows dilemmas and problems that a policeman has to face – just as a man, not only as a policeman.”
John Thaw, who died from cancer this week at the age of 60, landed his first paid role on a stall at Smithfield Market as a teenager. Former market porter Pat Dolan, 73, said he was amazed when the quiet lad who turned up for work at 3am and walked with a limp went on to star in hit TV shows The Sweeney, Inspector Morse and Kavanagh QC.
Mr Dolan, who now lives in Little Hulton, Bolton, said ''it was a big shock when he turned up on The Sweeney. But whenever he was on, I used to turn to the wife and say ‘I used to work with him!"
"He used to go for a pint in the White Bear on Swan Street, The Castle on Oldham Street and St Vincent’s on Oldham Road, but he was not a very talkative fellow."
Thaw was the elder of two brothers born in Manchester to lorry-driving father John and barmaid mother Dolly. But Thaw’s mother abandoned him and his brother Ray when John was seven years old. Thaw went to school at Ducie Technical High in Moss Side, where he passed only one O Level in English. But aware that the young Thaw was keen on acting, his headmaster suggested he applied to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where he went in 1958.
Mr Dolan, who started work at the market, aged 12, added: "He was a salesman on a stall, which sold fruit and veg, and he was just a regular bloke. He had a bad leg and walked with a limp."
"All my family were porters and we got to know all the salesmen. We used to turn up at three o’clock in the morning and he had to be there too for the stuff, which came in overnight."
"I was very sad when I heard that he’d died."
MORSE'S DEATH WAS GOOD FOR ME (Interview with John Thaw by Pam Francis for Realm Magazine, April 2001, article courtesy of Leila Poole) - With a successful career, a happy marriage and close family to keep him busy, the demise of the morose TV detective hasn’t troubled John Thaw one bit.
Morse, bless him, may have gone to meet his maker, but resting has been the last thing on John Thaw’s mind. Since the nation’s favourite detective collapsed and died of a heart attack, never to be seen again, except in endless repeats, the 59-year-old star has been busier than ever.
But he finds the time to sup tea at a London Hotel and talk about his latest role in the major ITV drama Buried Treasure. He does seem to excel in playing characters who, shall we say, are known more for their crustiness than their charm – and widower Harry Jenkins is no exception.
A hard-nosed businessman and golfing club captain, his life is extremely ordered as he rattles around alone in his huge detached house, until the news that his estranged daughter has been killed in a road accident. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he discovers he is a grandfather. His grand-daughter Saffron, a strong willed little girl is all alone in the world until guilt forces Harry to take her in.
For John it comes as a relief that after years of playing serious roles, such as Inspector Morse, Kavanagh QC and Jack Regan in The Sweeney, he can raise a few laughs even in this seemingly unlikely situation.
“I haven’t done many humorous things on TV, so for me this was a nice break. Here you have a very selfish guy, minding his own business and everything in the world going for him, and suddenly there is this tragedy which changes his life.”
With a small child let loose in his luxury house he hasn’t a clue what time an eight year old should go to bed, or what sort of pocket money they should have.
“Dominique, who plays Saffron, was a lovely kid to work with. She has a natural gift as an actress and I knew we would get on as soon as we met.”
She also bought a smile to the actor’s handsome, craggy face.
“We were waiting to do this scene and she said to me: Who are your favourite pop group?
So I said: The Rolling Stones. She looked at me and had obviously never heard of them. So I said: The Beatles.
She said: Oh, they’re from the olden days, aren’t they? Do you miss the olden days?”
John’s olden days were spent in Manchester with his father and younger brother. Like Saffron in Buried Treasure, John grew up without his mother from the age of seven when she left the family home for another man.
“Because Mum wasn’t there and it was just the three of us, we learnt how to look after ourselves and be resilient. You learnt how to pick yourself up, dust yourself down and get on with it. My Dad had a great sense of humour. It’s good to be able to laugh as a family. That often saves the day.”
John has three daughters: Melanie from his wife Sheila Hancock’s first marriage, whom John adopted; Abigail from his first marriage and Joanna from their marriage together. He is also, a proud grandfather to Jack, six, Lola, three and Molly-Mae, Four.
“I don’t see them as much of them as I would like because of work.” he says. “But I do what other grandparents do – kick a ball around the garden and play board games with them.
“If the kids are dropped off in the afternoon, because Mum has an appointment somewhere, you know she’ll take them away again, so you don’t have to think about feeding them, bathing them, and putting them to bed or talking about school.
It’s very different from being a parent. You have responsibility for their safety while they are in your care, but obviously you don’t have the constant duty to them in a way that a parent has. A grandparent can switch off and all you need to do is love them.”
In fact, it’s love that John has increasingly learnt to appreciate as he’s got older.
“I treasure my life with my wife and children, and my health. If you ain’t got your health, you ain’t got anything. There are times when you think your career is the most important thing in the world but you move on.
My career has always been important to me and still is. But less important than is used to be. Your learn that at the end of the day, there are more important things in life, such as the people you love.”
In 1999 John and Sheila went through their own drama with someone they loved very much when it was discovered that their grandson Jack had a tumour on his brain.
“The doctors had to examine it to see whether it was malignant and he had to surgery to remove it. They did the operation and then I had to go to France to film the TV drama Monsignor Renard. It was a week before we got the results, but fortunately it wasn’t malignant. They will have to keep an eye on him for some years of course, but, thank God, he’s as right as rain now.”
It wasn’t the family’s first brush with cancer. Thirteen years ago, John’s wife Sheila 68, was diagnosed with breast cancer – an episode in their lives which led to the couple splitting up for six months and, as John will admit, a miserable time for them both. Happily though, they reunited and have now been married for 28 years.
“Sheila and I have had our ups and downs,” says John. “But the thing that keeps us together apart from the fact we love each other, is having the same sense of humour and out look on like, the same beliefs about what is important, what’s right and wrong. If you fundamentally disagree, then when the initial romance goes, you’ve nothing to replace it with. You’ve got to have a solid foundation and mutual respect. I like Sheila, I respect her, and I know its vice-versa. That’s what kept us together.
We don’t live in each others pockets. Sheila sometimes goes to the theatre with friends because I am working, and I go to things that would bore her. So in that sense we are not always together.”
Where they do spend much of their time together is at their home in Wiltshire or their house in France. Where the millionaire actor can enjoy more anonymity – but no wine.
Alcohol, he says, is something he gave up a few years ago.
“Smoking and drinking is a mugs game. I used to do both, but I’ve not yet managed to kick the smoking,” He admits.
“You would be surprised how many people don’t drink now. It has become the ‘in’ thing to kick alcohol. I decided boozing wasn’t good for me and particularly some mornings if you had too much the night before. The only answer is if you don’t want to fell like that, don’t do it. Now I feel good. I wake up fresh and stay fresh till the end of the day.”
It could have been the booze or just overwork that killed Inspector Morse with a heart attack – or probably a mixture of both. But for John his death was a release.
“All good things come to an end. I am proud to have done it. When I say him head I had a mental flashback of the 15 years that we had been doing it. All the stories, all the various locations and the different actors and it all ends with a dead human being in the morgue."
“But in a way I think it is a good thing he died rather than driving off into the Oxford sunset. Supposing he had just retired and gone to live in Lyme Regis. In a couple of years ITV would have said. DO one more and we’ll set it in Lyme Regis and trouble is I probably would have been tempted.”
Filming the last ever episode of Morse was a slightly spooky business.
“We had a hand held camera. The funny thing was the camera wouldn’t work. It was really strange. The producer thought there was some spiritual thing. They checked everything three times and the camera still wouldn’t work. We took a 10 minute break and eventually it did work and we did the whole thing in one take.
“The fact that it is now out of my hands, because Morse as a character doesn’t exist anymore, means his death has been good for me professionally.”
Now John can work on other projects, including Buried Treasure and The Glass, another ITV drama to be shown later this year about a double glazing salesman and co-starring Sarah Lancashire.
“At my stage in the game, there are lots of pars you can’t play because you’re just too old, so you accept that. I’m getting to the point where I have done it now. I’ve earned my spurs. I’m not fighting anymore. I just enjoy what I have and what is around and whatever work I do and whoever I meet. I just enjoy the moment.”
"On some level I'm really surprised that my mother took part in the Miss World protest. It seems quite out of character now. When I was a kid, my mother took part in a lot of strikes and demonstrations, she fought for the night cleaners' campaign for unionisation and so on, but her feminism was very much rooted in intellectualism. She had split up with my father when she was 25 (I was three) and at that point had gone to Ruskin College, Oxford, and studied English and history. That was where she became interested in politics.
My mother and I lived in a big house in Pimlico with her partner, Gareth Stedman Jones, who was an academic, and various other couples, most of whom were artists. I suppose that sounds terribly unstable and eccentric, but it was a very loving environment. The set-up wasn't a commune. Each family occupied different sections of the house and we would come together at mealtimes and for political meetings. I never had a sense of being an only child because I was brought up with other children, who I almost thought of as siblings.
Living with so many men, there was never an absence of male role models in my life. And there was certainly no sense of women ruling the roost and men being the underdogs - I wasn't surrounded by wimpy, knit-your-own-yogurt, granola types. The situation was just equal. Men had their agenda, as did women. Also, I would see my father regularly.
Although kids in the playground would chant, "Burn your bra, burn your bra", my mother's feminism never made me feel uncomfortable or different. What did make me self-conscious was the fact that I was a middle-class child who went to a predominantly working-class primary school. At the time we were quite broke and we just used to eat things like brown rice and potatoes, and I would be dressed in smocks. I'd go to tea with my school friends and they'd have a television, white bread and pretty clothes. As an eight-year-old, it was that difference that mattered to me.
When I went to Pimlico Comprehensive, it was fine, because the other kids came from really mixed backgrounds. Then, after my A-levels and some time in Italy, I went to Rada. I'm sure that decision was influenced by my father, but actually neither of my parents wanted me to be an actress. My mum always said she wanted me to be a nuclear physicist or a great doctor.
When people talk now about the male identity being in crisis, my opinion swings considerably. There's no doubt that we do still live in a male-dominated society, a fact that's completely obvious when you look at the top level of any profession. For that reason, I don't have much truck with these male support groups that have cropped up. On the other hand, I think having a child opened my eyes to some possible difficulties. The male role within the family used to be very clearcut: providing security, a safe home, financial care. Now, though, while that male input is helpful, it's not essential. With women being encouraged to work, I think it must be more difficult for men to define their role and identity in the home.
My upbringing has definitely influenced how I want to raise my own daughter, Molly Mae, who's five. I want her to grow up believing that she can be whatever she wants to be and that there are no doors closed to her because of her sex. She is generally a very confident child, but what she has referred to recently, which frightens my partner Nigel and me, is concerns about her body image. Last summer, for example, before I was pregnant again, she said, "Your tummy's thin. Why have I got a big round tummy? I want a thin tummy." Now, that might just reflect the fact that little girls are fascinated with their mothers' bodies, but I found it quite alarming, especially since all her friends are into crop tops and showing off their bellybuttons.
When I was growing up, my mum wasn't very au fait with modern culture and I think that on some level she was appalled when I suddenly became obsessed with clothes and make-up as a child. Her whole life, of course, was dedicated to making sure that I didn't need to look glamorous to get ahead. I recognised her concern, so my interest in make-up became quite furtive. I don't want Molly to feel that friction. I want everything to be open to her, so that nothing becomes exciting simply because it's forbidden.
I think there's a general complacency about politics now, which I do find deeply depressing. I'm not first up, though, when it comes to doing anything myself, so maybe I can't complain. Social outlooks have shifted. I mean, look at the recent situation with the Miss World contest causing such horror in Nigeria, then being staged at Alexandra Palace. Why was there not a major protest about that? You see women protesting about the fur trade, throwing buckets of blood at supermodels, but when it comes to an issue like a woman in Nigeria being sentenced to death by stoning, nothing happens.
Over the years, my mum's feminism has mellowed, but I don't think she has any regrets. If it hadn't been for her and her contemporaries, we wouldn't have the choices we have now."
"Possibly, because he played many of his characters with an endearing grumpiness, I always expected John Thaw to be equally bad-tempered. He laughed when I told him I'd been scared of meeting him and admitted he had his testy moments when things weren't going well. There was nothing flash or showbizzy about him. If anything, he came across as slightly shy.
Family was all-important to John who had, of course, been married to actress Sheila Hancock for 29 years. It was a love ne needed - his lorry driver dad died of cancer five years ago, and John had grown up without his mother, Dorothy, who went off with another man when he was just seven. Although he didn't hate her, he never forgave her for deserting him and his brother. They met a couple of times, but the relationship was so cool that he didn't even know of her death in 1974 until weeks afterward.
We met again to talk about last year's ITV1 drama Buried Treasure, in which John plays a man who finds himself looking after his eight-year-old granddaughter. He used to chat with Dominique Jackson, the young actress who plays her, and one day she asked him the name of his favorite group. When it was obvious that she hadn't heard of the Rolling Stones, John tried the Beatles.
"She looked at me and said, "Oh, they're from the olden days, aren't they? Do you miss the olden days?"
His olden days in showbusiness spanned nearly 42 years. Between filming, he loved relaxing with Sheila at their house in France, or playing with his grandchildren at home in Wiltshire.
He loved Morse and told me a spooky story about the filming of the character's death scene. "We did it in one take with a hand-held camera, but the funny thing was, the camera wouldn't work. It was really strange. The producer thought it was some spiritual thing as they checked it three times, but every time they said "Action", the camera wouldn't come on."
Morse's death hadn't made him think about his own life, he said, more that his career was less important to him than it used to be, and he was taking more time off. "I'm getting to the point where I've done it now," he said. "I've earned my spurs." He certainly has.
Through The Sweeney, Inspector Morse, Kavanagh QC and dramas such as Goodnight Mister Tom, John Thaw dominated British TV for 25 years. TV editor Alison Graham pays tribute to the actor much loved by RT readers.
The one great quality that John Thaw brought to all his successful television roles - DI Jack Regan in The Sweeney, Inspector Morse and Kavanagh QC - was his air of reassurance.
Television audiences knew they were in safe hands when Thaw was around. Like his closest movie counterpart, Steve McQueen, Thaw's strongest characters were always flawed but capable men, men who could get the job done, though often at personal cost. He bought to all his best television characters a muscular, emotional masculinity that men admired and women adored.
With what I think was this greatest role, that of Regan in The Sweeney, he brought to our screens, perhaps for the first time, a kind of workaday machismo. He was a hard man operating in a hard world, teetering on a tightrope that threatened to tip him into the arms of the very people he was supposed to be protecting the rest of us from.
But then Regan wasn't Dixon of Dock Green. Policing his part of London called for the kind of brutal pragmatism that in another age might have been seen as criminal activity.
Thaw's gift was that he could play Regan in a way that left us frequently breathless at his audacity, but still smiling at his cheek. And we were always on his side. And he made Regan - and later Morse - seem approachable. Was there a man in the land who didn't feel they could chat to Regan if they ever met him in a pub? (This facet of Thaw's TV persona is the most ironic, as in real life he was very uncomfortable with this aspect of fame.)
Jack Regan was TV's first maverick cop. He had a difficult personal life - a marriage wrecked by his devotion to The Job, a fondness for whisky, and far too many casual liaisons with brassy women. But thanks entirely to Thaw; Regan would never, ever become a cliché like the maverick cops of today's TV, because Thaw made him human and not cardboard cutout.
Regan is still an enduring TV icon. No greatest TV cops compilation is ever complete without him. No jaunty list of greatest TV catchphrases is complete without "We're the Sweeney, son, and we haven't had an dinner." Or "Get yer trousers on, you're nicked."
Inspector Morse was, arguably, a much more refined version of Jack Regan. Of course, he wasn't a man of action. There was no racing round wastelands in big boxy cars. Morse was cerebral. He liked real ale, crosswords and opera. Unlike Regan, Chief Inspector Morse existed before Thaw ever played him, in the books of Colin Dexter. But Thaw became so thoroughly identified with the part, Dexter even refined small details in his later books to accommodate his interpretation of the role.
Crucially, like Regan before him and Kavanagh QC later on, Morse was emotionally wounded. This made him enormously attractive to female audiences. (It helped too, of course, that Thaw was a very handsome man.)
And again there was that reassurance. An awful crime has been committed, but everything will be all right, because Thaw is here. Of course he's going to solve the puzzle, and we'll all be able to sleep easy in our beds.
With Inspector Morse, Thaw was responsible for that rapidly disappearing, if not extinct beast, the truly unifying television event. A new two-hour Morse story was a cancel - everything occasion. Pubs weren't exactly cleared - in these days of so many television channels; barely anything does this any more. But the streets seemed a little emptier.
And all out lives will seem a little emptier now that Thaw is no longer with us. He made the massively popular Goodnight Mister Tom, and he also made some duffers, but everyone is entitled to make mistakes. It's a measure of the regard in which Thaw is held that he's forgiven for them.
Even the likes of Buried Treasure, a mildly embarrassing piece of fluff made before what turned out to be Thaw's premature retirement from our TV screens to fight the illness that was to kill him, won a massive audience.
John Thaw was the first real television Everyman. To his greatest roles he brought qualities that we could all recognise amd empathise with.
We will miss him.
When John Thaw died of cancer in 2002, viewers lost a great actor and, with him, some of the best drama ever seen on TV. There was Inspector Morse, obviously, and also Kavanagh QC, in which he played a serious and eminent QC, engaged in the fight for truth and justice in the courtroom.
These could never be replaced, but following a random, convivial supper one evening, involving John Thaw's friends and the team who brought us Morse and Kavanagh, a new legal series has been born.
With Alan Davies taking the starring role as a shambolic criminal barrister with a terrifying workload, complicated love life and gambling problems, The Brief manages that rare thing of being different - while still promising the same must-see mix of drama, suspense and humour.
Executive producer Ted Childs, the man behind not only Inspector Morse and Kavanagh QC, but also World War Two drama, Goodnight Mister Tom, is all too aware that John is a hard act to follow. But he hopes viewers will take to this week's new ITV1 four-part series.
'When John sadly became ill and died, we knew it was the end of Kavanagh.' Says Ted. 'We wanted to do another legal series but felt it had to be as far away from Kavanagh as possible - we didn't want to do a cheap clone of what John did so successfully.'
Funnily enough, it was over a few bottles of exceedingly good wine (Morse would have approved) that Ted and the series' writer Dusty Hughes, found their inspiration. 'We were having an enjoyable, if lengthy, supper with David Etherington, QC - who had acted as an adviser on Kavanagh - and he started telling us that a lot of the interesting court stuff was done by barristers in their mid-30's, who are to young to become QCs,' says Ted.
'Apparently, they're often a certain type - they have a colourful life that gets them into all sorts of trouble, such as gambling, divorce and dept. they end up working around the clock just to keep their heads above water and, from this supper, Dusty went away and came back with the character of Henry Farmer, The Brief.'
To say Henry has a colourful life is a bit of an understatement. Though he has the gift of the gab in the courtroom, it's fair to say his life is in chaos.
He's up to his eyes in debt with a gambling habit and alimony payments; he has a rocky relationship with his ex-wife; he misses his son, who lives in Australia. He's having an affair with Polly Graham (Zara Turner), the wife of a prominent politician who won't leave her husband; and he's constantly locking horns with his severely-lacking-in-humour QC colleague, Cleo Steyn (Cherie Lunghi).
'Alan sprang straight to mind,' says Ted. 'We through he'd be a great as a man committed to justice, but who can't stay out of bother. Everyone thought he'd be good, particularly because he'd made such a success of Jonathan Creek.'
Much as he likes Henry, Alan Davies reckons he couldn't be more different from his alter ego, who this week takes on more cases than he can handle. Alan's no gambler, for a start.
'I can understand the thrill that keeps people hooked, but gambling holds no interest for me at all,' says the 38-year-old. 'The biggest difference between me and Henry is that he really doesn't worry about money, which I can't understand because I was brought up by an accountant and have a very different approach.
'Henry says at one point that his father introduced him to gambling, aged seven, by taking him to Cheltenham races and giving him £50 to spend. I can remember my dad taking me to an amusement arcade where I spent all of 72p in 2p pieces, which really annoyed him!'
Alan, who reportedly recently broke up with his Jonathan Creek co-star Julia Sawalha, admits he was initially worried whether viewers would accept him as a barrister. 'Hmm, I was a bit concerned about the wig,' he smiles. 'But the producer told me that John Thaw had exactly the same concerns and they told him it wouldn't be long before wigs were abolished. They told me that same thing, so I'm fully expecting wigs to stay for at least another 20 years!'
