The first thing they tell you when you show up at drama school, and they don’t let up much for the next three years, is it don’t really matter what it is: panto in the Falklands, some wanker out of film school’s first, very personal feature, which involves you freezing your nuts off in a warehouse somewhere, covered in stage blood, screaming about your mum, or an ad campaign for a major high street bank – you should never say no to a bit of work. That actors act, they don’t ‘rest’; that what they specifically don’t do is sit around in front of the afternoon racing, dreaming of glory at the RSC.

And it ain’t bad advice. But it ain’t great advice, either. Tom, a mate of mine from college, who’d played a blinder as Prospero at the end of our third year, got lamped in the pub the other week by some mug who’d just had a loan for his business rejected, and arrived in the boozer on the warpath, basically.

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Tom said, collared outside in a bar on the river, wearing a scarf – quite a posh lad is Tom, which might’ve inflamed the situation. ‘But I am a thespian!’

‘You’re a what?’

‘I mean I’m an actor … I’m only an actor. I don’t actually work there.’

‘Oh yeah? You took their money though, didn’t you?’

‘But it was just for the day. And I’m not sure the ad was meant to be an accurate depiction of life at the bank … You don’t think they go around giving each other high five the whole time, do you?’

‘Actually, yeah, I do. They gave thumbs down to my loan anyway, you posh bastard.’

‘Shouldn’t you be taking this up with your branch manager?’

‘But I’m taking it up with you. You cunt.’

‘And I’m telling you, mate, that I can’t help you. I wish I could, but honestly, I wouldn’t know a fixed rate mortgage from a kick in the balls.’

Bad choice of words that, as it turned out.

‘You have to pay your dues in this game, Matt,’ said Tom over the dog from his hospital bed a few days later. ‘You have to take a few lumps and I accept that. But not in the nuts surely? I could have understood if I was a villain in a soap. But just for an advert?’

‘Well, it is quite an annoying ad, mate. It’s on all the time.’

‘I know, I know. What a laugh we all have there, selling ISA’s to an unsuspecting public … I can’t even watch telly, Matt, in case the bloody thing comes on … What are we doing here? Where are the great roles? When will we ever play … the Dane?’

‘Don’t ask me, mate. Ask the agent.’

‘Ah yes,’ said Tom brightening slightly ‘How goes it with the tartan beast of NW2?’

‘Fuck knows. I’m supposed to ring him. Apparently, there’s some work on, but he don’t say what.’

‘He never quite does, does he?’

‘No.’

‘Oh well.’

‘Oh well indeed, mate.’

‘Yeah.’

So;

‘Listen, McTavish … No, you listen, mate,’ I was saying to the agent, over the dog a few days later ‘Matt Mitchell is a trained, classical actor …’

‘Now Matthew,’ replied McTavish, in his sinister Morningside drone, ‘Dinnae be so melodramatic. Quite apart from anything else, I wonder you’re established enough to refer to yourself in the third person?’

‘And whose fault’s that? You kilted nutter?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You heard me.’

‘I see.’

‘I’m not doing the fucking Edinburgh Festival again, McTavish. I’m a strong man, I know -”

‘Yes. Yes you are Matt …’

‘But I just can’t fucking face it, you know? Not again … I just can’t fucking – can’t deal with it …’

‘I will attempt to look into this,’ said McTavish. ‘But I cannot promise anything.’

I sank onto the bathroom floor.

So, matters between myself and McTavish had deteriorated lately. I, Matt Mitchell, who’d done Ibsen, who’d played Pinter, who’d graduated with honours from his class at drama school, had got off to a fairly promising start career-wise, starring as a hard-drinking, wife-beating teenage father in BBC3’s surprise ratings smash, Alcopop, to some fairly decent notices.

‘The sick face of young Britain!!!’ The Sun had observed, seemingly a bit unclear as to whether the film was a documentary or not. I steal the child benefit and spend it on crack. I dish out some shoeings left, right and centre, to any mother, young or otherwise, who tries it on. In the climactic scene, my character hits a Holland Park pre-natal class with a few cans of petrol, and beer.

‘This is for all the geezers who don’t wanna be trapped!’ I shout. ‘I did my best as a Dad!’

I go up in flames. Everybody goes up in flames.

Okay, it was BBC, council estate, lifestyle porn. Though I say so myself it was pretty good, but had my performance been too convincing? Had I come across as too unlovable for mainstream telly? I was no oil painting, it’s true, and in the reviews, there’d been a suggestion that I looked like nothing so much as a young Bob Hoskins, or worse still, Wayne Rooney. That is, just Wayne Rooney. Not a younger version. Getting into the acting racket, that ain’t the kind of thing you want to hear.

Anyway, for whatever reason, since Alcopop, the expected offers from the soaps had failed to materialise. At least unless you’re including my “West Ham Fan” on The Bill, my “Second Hoodie” in a Hollyoaks special, and most recently, which says a fair bit about the direction my career was taking, my “Dead Crack Dealer”, in an unusually hard-edged edition of Midsomer Murders. So what it all boiled down to was basically this; was I now in danger of being type-cast, of being stuck in the same moody tracksuit and Arsenal top, until I found myself literally driving a mini-cab? It was beginning to look like a real possibility.

So I’d taken the call from McTavish’s office with a hangover, basically.

‘Matthew,’ he said, ‘I understand your frustration. You are a serious artiste. Rome, however, wasnae built in a day.’

‘Yeah, but how exactly is me giving another young mum a kicking on Holby City going to help with that, McTavish?’

‘I can only work with the clay I’ve been given, Matthew. Now tell me, are you familiar with Danny Dyer, the actor? Star of Human Traffic and The Football Factory?’

‘Are you mugging me off, mate? All I seem to be up for is parts that knobber’s turned down.’

‘I believe I have explained to you, Matthew, about the pecking order in these matters. The chain of command, as it were.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said, reciting the mantra. ‘There’s Caine, Hoskins and Winstone, the premier league. Then Phil Daniels, Danny Dyer, the first division. And then Millwall. Crystal Palace … Leyton Orient … ‘

‘The new breed, Matthew. The coming young things. Although there’s rather a glut of you laddies at the moment, it’s true.’

‘That’s supposed to make me feel better is it?’

‘I am about to tell you, if you”ll let me get a word in edgeways … Now, young Dyer has recently been getting some very decent ratings – ratings, let me tell you, that were perhaps not expected – for his series on Bravo, Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men.’

‘Yeah, I’ve seen it.’

‘Really? That’s marvelous. I’m afraid I haven’t, myself.’

‘Too busy having dinner at The Ivy, eh mate?’

‘Don’t be a bore, Matthew dear. Now, here’s the situ …’

So the situ was this: In series one of his show, Dyer had interviewed a succession of colourful characters: ex-football hooligans, ex-bare knuckle boxers, ex-armed robbers and so on. All now reformed, to be sure, but all still happy enough to take a walk down memory’s back alleyways, for an appropriate fee. Well fair enough, I suppose. In crime, as on stage, you more or less have to make your own pension arrangements. And all this, as McTavish said, had been a bit of a hit. But in TV, as in crime, you can’t rest on your laurels. So in series two, the stakes had been raised, as Dyer spent a few nights round the deadly men’s houses, meeting their better halves, having dinner with the family and seeing how they lived. Invariably, he’d start off ‘shitting himself’ (and given the format, who could blame him) but they’d always ending up bonding down at the local, over a few pints.

So what the powers that be at Steve TV (it’s low on the menu if you’ve got Sky or cable, but it is there) wanted to do was make a pilot for a similar, but edgier, and more youth-orientated show, in which someone, (i.e. Muggins here), would take the Deadly Men concept to ‘the next level.’

Which brings us back, pretty much, to where we came in.

‘So basically, McTavish,’ I said, after he’d laid out the scenario, in his usual uncertain terms, which had got bigger names than me into ads for cat food, breakfast cereal, and in one case, famously, for Toilet Duck, ‘they want me to get off with the geezer’s bird?’

‘Always with the drama, Matthew …’

‘Okay, to try, at least, to get off with not one, not two, but what is it, six of the better halves of men who have done, between them, about eighty years in prison? Do I sound, to you, McTavish, like I want to be part of the London Marathon?’

‘I encourage all my clients, Matthew, to pursue a healthy exercise routine.’

‘I mean literally a part of it. Buried alive under the tarmac, mate.’

‘You don’t think you’re exaggerating slightly?’

‘McTavish, just because it looks like I’ve done a stretch in borstal, it doesn’t mean I’d last five minutes in there.’

‘Now Matthew, I’m sure that’s not true … Certainly, it’s hard to picture you encountering difficulties in the showers …’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Just my little joke, Matthew. Anyway, it’s not your skills as a fighter that are required here, so much as your abilities as a lover.’

‘Yeah well, one thing leads to the other, in my experience.’

‘Exactly! And it’s your experience we’re after here, laddie. You know how to talk to these people.’

Yeah, you say “sorry sir, yes, I did spill your pint, I’ll get you another one” and then you get out of Dodge for a couple of months. What you don’t do is turn round and try and give the bloke’s Doris the benefit.’

‘Nobody’s talking about giving anyone “the benefit” Matthew. Why, if that were true, you’d barely be more than a common ponce.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Look, you were not Steve TV’s first choice, Matthew, it’s true. They were after someone a wee bit more … picturesque. But chin up! I gather they’re fond of the old sobriquet.’

‘The … what?’

‘Your name, Matthew. The alliteration.’

‘Yeah, I got that, McTavish. Alfie Allen turned this down right?’

‘I gather young Allen was otherwise engaged, yes. But don’t let that put you off.’

‘No … So it’s going to be called, what, Matt Mitchell’s Mobbed-Up Monsters? ‘

‘I don’t think the interviewees would take too kindly to that description, do you?’

‘Matt Mitchell’s Many Mentalists?‘

‘Thankfully Matthew, your input on that level will not be required.’

‘Wait, I know. Matt Mitchell’s Murderous Maniacs.’

‘Christ,’ said McTavish, ‘must I always be surrounded by silly wee laddies?’

‘That’s a question that’ll have to be answered eventually, I suppose.’

‘Look,’ McTavish sighed, ‘you’re always complaining about not being stretched in your work. So you could think of this as an opportunity to show your range. To put your best foot forward as a mischievous, cockney, Jack the Lad sort. Everybody loves that rubbish, these days. Otherwise, of course, you’re more than welcome to pursue an alternative career at the turf accountant’s, Matthew, pickling your insides with drink and regrets.’

‘So it’s like that, is it? I’ve got big dreams, I want fame, but fame costs. And right here’s where I start paying, in sweat?’

‘That’s very eloquently put. You young laddies, you come out of stage school with no bloody clue, expecting the world on a platter …’

‘RADA, mate.’ I said. ‘I went to RADA. As I believe it says on my CV.’

‘Oh aye, so it does. Still, no amount of college education is a substitute for paying one’s dues. Why, I remember my own youth, touring the country in our trusty wee Transit … experimental theatre, that was where it was at … it was a very different time.’

‘Yeah, well, the less said about it the better. But what are you saying, that I haven’t suffered enough for my art?’

‘Your words, Matthew. Not mine.’

‘But Mc Tavish, ‘I was about to ask him, ‘how can you say that, when you’ve been my agent for the last four years?’

It was at this point, however, that McTavish quoted a figure.

‘I see … Straight up? Just for a pilot?’

‘Indeed. And there would, of course, be more to follow, subject to a satisfactory performance.’

‘Right.’ I said. ‘Right.’

If this sounds like an iffy idea for a TV series, then that’s because it was. But it was never broadcast. Consider what does get shown, Dogs With Jobs and so on, and then imagine the projects that don’t make the cut. Beneath what you see on telly, there is another, darker world.

And so it was that a few weeks later, I found myself outside a mock-Tudor mansion in darkest Basildon. It was ten in the morning, and I was making my way through a four-pack of Stella, the old wife-beater, ironically enough, I thought, as Clifton Styles, the subject, came pimp-rolling down his front drive. Should I, with hindsight, have started drinking so early? Well, probably not, is the answer to that, but it was strange to be back.

‘Okay Matt,’ said Seb, the director. ‘Ready to roll, yes?’

‘I feel like dropping the kids off, mate, as it goes.’

‘Really?’ said Seb, not inspiring much confidence in his understanding of the milieu we were about to enter, ‘I didn’t know you had children.’

‘If this comes on top, mate,’ I said ‘there’s a fairly good chance I never will.’

The problems implicit in bonding with Styles, never mind his good lady, were clear from the outset. He was from round my area (I’m a Basildon boy myself, hence the move into acting, soon as I could) but I’d never heard of this bloke. So in the van on the way over, I’d gone through his charge sheet. Which all seemed to date from a Tuesday morning back in the Nineties, when Styles, instead of watching Sky Sports or the Adult channel, had opted instead to pay a visit to his local Barclays, to discuss his account. Well, fair enough, you might think, except it’s probably not if you’ve been up smoking crack for a couple of days, and if, what’s more, you’ve forgotten to leave your Uzi at home. Going to the bank being a frustrating business at the best of times. To be fair to the bloke, he’d always claimed to regret this, but then you would do really, if, in the space of fifteen minutes, you’d pretty much scuppered your alleged drugs empire, and on top of that earned yourself ten years in Pentonville. Even with time off for good behaviour, or at least, not getting done for any more bad behaviour, that was still an expensive morning’s work. Probably best not to mention that, though.

So here he was now, the man of the hour, maybe five-six, five-seven, in shades, lots of gold and a white Prada tracksuit. With his shaved head and tatts, he looked like nothing so much as toddler with form, but always beware of the short man’s issues, and that’s especially true if there’s a fairly good chance that he still has weapons stored in his home.

‘Clifton mate,’ I said, offering a hand ‘How you doing, bruv?’

‘I ain’t’ said Styles, ‘your brother. You cunt.’

The morning sun flashed off his jewellery, the SUV parked in the driveway, and his wife’s blonde extensions. His wife, that was, who was standing in the doorway like a fairytale princess, who’d been trapped in a castle by an evil dwarf … Or conceivably just by an eye-popping boob job. What were they, double E? Double F? Whatever, it couldn’t have been easy to get around Basildon with those on display. Maybe I could do this, after all?

‘My apologies, Mr Styles.’ I said. ”Thank you for inviting me … sorry us,‘ I went on, making a point of including the film crew, ‘into your lovely home.’

‘Yeah,’ Styles said ‘fucking gorgeous, innit? See anything you like?’

‘Well, I love with what you’ve done with the garden, mate.’

‘Yeah. Are you looking at my wife?’

‘Well … ‘ I said, inwardly wishing a dose of clap on McTavish. This being the hard man’s version of a zen koan. In that however you answer it, you’re almost bound to get a slap.

‘I said, are you looking at my wife?’

‘I, er ….’

‘So you’re saying she’s a dog then?’ said Styles.

‘No, mate, what I”m saying is …’

‘What? You ain’t saying nothing, are you?’ snapped Styles, before slinging a stubby arm over my shoulder, and adding, with a evil, gold-toothed grin, ‘I’m only having a giggle. You look like you’ve done a shit in your knickers, mate.’

‘Yeah, I had a few too many last night, as it goes …’

‘What, fists up your arse? Listen, Mitchell, or whatever your name is,’ said Styles, the temperature, in spite of the sunshine, apparently dropping by quite a few notches, so much so that I suddenly did fear for the state of my boxers, as well as my teeth, fingers and so on; for a short bloke, he did have presence ‘don’t feel shy on my account. If you’ve got something you want to say, just spit it out.’

No, nothing, Mr Styles,’ I said. ‘Nothing.’

‘Good,’ said Styles, after an uncomfortable silence. ‘Right then, let’s crack on.’

The next problem with the shoot appeared to be this, that while some of Dyer’s deadly men had presumably heard of, and maybe even seen a few of his films, it soon became clear that Styles had no real idea who Matt Mitchell was. That he was under the impression we were there from Grand Designs, or one of the other property porn shows.

Still, that wasn’t a totally bad thing, I supposed, seeing as Debs, the long-suffering, while she obviously wasn’t going to have much of a say in the slice of Marbella Styles was trying to create here, was still invited along on the tour of the estate. Of the projected summerhouse and the half-built pool, and the recently-completed Tudor-style villa. Which gave me the chance to put in some spadework, a quip here and there, the odd cheeky grin, before, after one too many questions about E’s in the Nineties (extortion, Ecstasy, Essex, et cetera) the penny finally dropped.

A tricky few minutes then ensued. Clearly, I couldn’t exactly tell Styles what we were really doing there, but I think I just about managed to smooth things over. At least, it appeared to be sufficient to the hour for everyone to accept that these days, Clifton Styles was a legitimate businessman. That Clifton Styles had always been a legitimate businessman, and that anyone who thought otherwise could meet him in the alleyway round the back of his local.

Which brought me to my next suggestion, that we visit the pub, for some local colour. And so it was that six hours later, as we came stumbling out of the Steve TV people-carrier, Styles singing ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles’, before collapsing in the drive like a wounded animal, everything seemed to be going pretty swimmingly.

‘Oh God,’ Debs said ‘plastered again and it’s not even seven … how d’you let him get like this?’

‘Don’t look at me, Mrs Styles,’ I said ‘I wanted to stick to the beers, as it goes. But he’s a hard man to argue with.’

‘Don’t I know it … All right, let’s get him inside … Yeah, you lot and all,’ Debs said to the film crew. ‘And you can turn that bloody thing off too. I don’t know what he’s been saying, but if you even think about showing it, you’ll be hearing from his brief … His brief if you’re lucky.’

‘Of course,’ said Seb, looking pretty much traumatised, after the five solid hours of bloodcurdling anecdotes we’d just endured. Still, courage Matt, I was thinking. Strength. The show must go on.

Styles safely ensconced in the spare bedroom then, (‘Let him sleep it off the filthy, drunken pig!’) Debs insisted we stay for dinner.

‘It’s the least I can do’, she said, as we sat down in the dining room, ‘And I don’t see many people, now the kids have grown up,’ she went on, before adding, coyly, ‘you wouldn’t think it now, but I used to be an actress myself.’

‘Oh nonsense, Mrs Styles,’ I said, having wondered about this earlier, ‘you’re a very attractive lady.’

‘Cheeky!’ laughed Debs, Seb and the others just looking on, horrified. But perhaps the greatest compliment you can pay anyone who’s starred on the stage or the silver screen, (and Caine, Hoskins and Dyer would agree, I’m sure), is that you’ve watched one of their performances all the way through, more than once. As, I explained to Mrs Styles, had been the young Matt’s experience with Essex Babes 11.

‘You remember that?’ Debs said.

‘Oh yeah. Vividly.’

‘Now you, Mr Mitchell,’ she said, her decolletage looming as she topped up my Chardonnay, ‘can call me Debs.’

‘And you,’ I said, thinking, bingo, you rogue, ‘can call me Matt.’

So the wine duly flowed, and the gin and the Malibu, along with tales of times past, of the glory days of late Eighties showbiz, when Debs, it turned out, had been to a lot of parties. And met a lot of the players, directors, producers, agents and so on, the stars of successful ITV dramas, in what apparently hadn’t been more innocent times, after all. That world of Piat D’or, yachts and Poison perfume. And all this, she said, when she’d been a buxom ingenue (my words, not hers) of just eighteen.

‘Or at least, Mr Mitchell …’

‘Matt, please.’

‘Oh yeah. Well anyway, that’s what I’d say to get into the clubs.’

‘Right. So then how did you get into modelling?’

‘Well Matt, I was working as a receptionist at the time. But I hadn’t really been hired for my secretarial skills, you know? So I thought I could stick around in the City until I got married, being eyed up by the blokes there all day anyway, or I could take arms against a sea of troubles, you know? I mean, everyone seemed to think of me naked anyway …’

‘Really?’ I coughed.

‘Yeah … so moving into glamour work just seemed like the logical step. All I was doing was sitting there smiling; why not do it with my clothes off? For about a third of the hours, and eight times the money?’

‘I can’t really argue with that,’ I don’t remember saying, but it’s there on the tape, Debs having been persuaded, without too much trouble (she had the biz in her blood, after all, as well as three or four Snowballs, by this point) to let us start filming again.

‘I could see all that Greenham Common stuff going out the window, Matt. You know, everyone wanted to party again? All that about not wearing miniskirts; I just thought, who decides? Some mad old bint on a college course somewhere, or me?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. In a way, I was disengaged from Seb and the film crew. Being back in Basildon, once again drunk and enraptured by Debs, was a Proustian experience. Twelve years earlier I’d been a big fan, and here I was now, on the other side of the mirror. By now, I’d had four bottles of Stella, plus another five or six pints, a couple of shots and a few glasses of wine; I felt indestructible.

‘I mean I’d left school with an O level in art and a couple of CSE’s, Matt,’ Debs continued ‘But I didn’t see the point of beating myself up about it.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘It wasn’t a hard decision. What was the difference between me and the girls doing Page 3? A boob job, a tan and a bit of luck?’

‘Yeah. So you went up by … quite a few sizes, I’m guessing … well, we all have to pay our dues somehow, I suppose …’

‘What are you on about, Matt? These?’

‘I … yeah.’

‘Oh come on, there’s no need to be bashful Actually, shall I tell you who you remind me of?’

‘Bob Hoskins?’ I supposed. ‘Wayne Rooney?’

‘Now you mention it, there is a resemblance. But no, I was thinking more Benny Hill.’

‘I see …’

‘He was a lovely man, you know?’

‘I’m sure he was a great man, Debs, but he must have been about sixty when you knew him … how can you possibly think that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know … I just do.’

‘Seb,’ I said, into the camera, ‘we can edit this, right?’

‘At this point Matt, what’d be the difference?’

‘Good.’ I said. ‘So anyway Debs, about your career …’

‘My boobs, yeah? Well, these are the upgrades. They came a bit later. They were a wedding present, actually.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘You seem a bit more … generously proportioned than I remember.’

(I know, I know, but what can I tell you? You can take the boy out of Basildon …)

‘What, are you saying you don’t like them?”

‘Not at all, Mrs Styles. Not at all. Anyway,’ I went on ‘Where were we …’

If anything though, Debs’ anecdotes turned out to be even less suitable for telly than her husband’s had been. While Styles had subtly, and then not so subtly, alluded to a series of events to do with, among other things, certain night clubs, pubs and new-build properties in Nineties Essex, at least most of the faces he’d mentioned weren’t really in a position to take legal action. For just the reasons you’d think But this wasn’t the case with a lot of the names Debs had met on her travels through London’s hot spots, during much the same period. From what I could gather, if we’d thought about trying to show any of that, Steve TV legal would have had kittens, a fit.

By rights then, we should have left it there. We should have packed up the cameras and gone back to London, for an almost certain bollocking from the show’s producers, to maybe try and reschedule for another occasion, when everyone involved wasn’t quite so sloshed.

But I must have been starstruck by Debs’ showbiz memories. And so I decided that while this wasn’t exactly King Lear at the Royal Vic, I was still a professional, and had to at least have a go at the money shot, or risk losing my fee for the pilot altogether. So I rallied my strength and I rallied my training; I rallied the dregs of the Mitchell charm, and suggested something on the lines of a quick, cheeky snog, like an autograph, I said, for old times’ sake.

I’ve had better ideas, though; as might have been predicted, given the way the shoot had gone so far (but you never see this sort of thing coming, until it’s too late) there was a thump on the stairs, and a furious roar by the doorway, and the Clifton Styles mock-Tudor Spanish villa-type dining room went a bad shade of black.

So, what’s to be said, now I’m here in the trauma ward, where I’ll be for a bit?

Well, that Clifton’s lawyers and Steve TV legal appear to have come to a compromise, and that I won’t be selling my story to the tabloids, after all. That the footage, while it is pretty interesting, like early Scorsese meets Celebrity Wife Swap, will probably never be shown, at least outside the confines of a couple of private Soho screening rooms. And that once I get out of hospital, I could easily end up back on the set of The Hospital, or Holby City, ironically enough. But it’s hard to feel totally negative about the whole situation. Because for one thing, being saved, as I was, by the lovely Debs is a memory I’ll treasure (or at least, it’s a memory I would treasure – again, all I have is a tape) and for another, I must, after the hiding I took, be pretty much stuffed as a TV hard man.

If Bob Hoskins, say, had, at the start of his career, been kicked in on camera by a short-arse like Styles, and then into the bargain been rescued by his lady, it’s difficult to see how his standing in the business would have recovered. No more roles as a gangster for ‘Oskins. No Long Good Friday, no Mona Lisa …. actually, looking at it that way, what did I do?

Still, courage, Matt. Strength. Remember your training. Remember Daniels, Dyer and the rest of the blokes. Remember where the painkillers are.

Phew.

So being a geezer on screen is an act, of course. But the way the telly is these days, if you can’t keep it up you’re in bother, it seems. It’s all about front, it’s about self-respect. That I’ve now been outed as not having much of either arguably isn’t so good – I’ll maybe know more once McTavish gets in touch, which, needless to add, he hasn’t done so far, the Scotch git.

But still, bandaged up here, with all this chirping machinery, on what really does feel like a career-changing path, I suppose I’ll be put forward for different roles, from now on. Whether the floppy-haired students, background accountants and expendable best friends I should think I’ll be playing will lead me any closer to my dreams of glory at the RSC remains to be seen. But it has to be a step in the right direction. If nothing else, surely no one can now say I haven’t paid my dues? Or that I have not suffered enough, for my art?

About Quintin Forrest

Quintin Forrest, like foxes, like all sensible people, moved to London a while ago. His debut collection of satirical, metro-centric short stories, Tales Of Modern Stupidity, is now available to buy on Amazon!

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