My acting career
In a previous life I was an actor, so I've actually been in front of the camera a fair few times. Among other things I was on Grange Hill for about 30 seconds (my lines: 'Hey girls, feel like spending some time with us?' and 'Oh no?') and the only human character in a short-lived puppet show called Pullover that was created by my mother.

The weirdest thing I was in, and the one which pretty much decided me that I wasn't going to devote my life to acting, was a short slot on Good Morning with Anne and Nick. It was a TV version of Simon Bates' Radio 1 show Our Tune, where viewers write in with a sob story about their life, which he would read out against a cheesy soundtrack. The TV version was the same, but with the added feature of a 'dramatisation' of the events. The idea was to do a kind of Ken Loach thing with it - semi-improvised scenes, gritty inner-city landscapes, that kind of shit.

My role was the son of a divorced couple. The story was that after they'd divorced and the mother had got custody, the father stole the kids away by letting them smoke and drink. My job was to look surly - 'Hey - you fucking scared me', said the director enthusiastically.

I spent a day filming, and during idle moments I looked at the other, older actors around me. The guy playing my dad was very pleasant, but he was in his fifties, and I found myself thinking - Jesus, you're a professional actor, and you've been in the business for years, and you're still doing this kind of crap. I realised that I was destined to go the same way - I wasn't a bad actor, but I wasn't particularly good either, plus I'm short and snaggle-toothed and thus destined for a life of playing dodgy drug dealers and accident victims.

I have a good face for radio and so did quite a bit of work there, but Good Morning was my last TV role.
( flatfrog Staring vacantly into space, Thu 11 Jun 2009, 18:20, Reply)