A working-class hero

By Brian Viner

As befits a man brought up in the gloomy Victorian terraces in the shadow of Goodison Park, home of Everton Football Club, Ricky Tomlinson likes to observe that his life has been a game of two halves. Characteristically, he puts it in a slightly more earthy way. "My life has been in two halves, like my arse," he tells interviewers.

As befits a man brought up in the gloomy Victorian terraces in the shadow of Goodison Park, home of Everton Football Club, Ricky Tomlinson likes to observe that his life has been a game of two halves. Characteristically, he puts it in a slightly more earthy way. "My life has been in two halves, like my arse," he tells interviewers.

Whatever, he has spent the second half as a remarkably fine actor, popping up like a Scouse garden gnome in a series of powerful dramas about the working - or, more precisely, the unemployed - classes, from Alan Bleasdale's Boys From The Black Stuff to Jimmy McGovern's Dockers to Ken Loach's Riff-Raff and Raining Stones. To some people, his alter ego will forever remain Bobby Grant, the bolshie but principled shop steward in Channel 4's Brookside. But it is as Jim Royle, the fat, flatulent, stingy, vulgar, wise-cracking, essentially warm-hearted paterfamilias welded to his armchair (below)in BBC1's glorious comedy The Royle Family, that he has become a cultural icon.

"Cultural icon my arse," would be Jim's derisive response to that, yet it seems that hardly a day goes by when he does not gaze out from a newspaper or magazine, illustrating an article about the nation's viewing habits, or our exercise habits, or the North-South divide, or whatever. Improbable as it must once have seemed, Tomlinson's face has become his fortune. For it is a face not so much lived-in as evicted-from. His characterful nose alone should be protected by the Liverpool branch of English Heritage.

Of course, his face would be unknown were it not for his unnervingly naturalistic acting skills, deployed to their most devastating effect in Jimmy McGovern's extraordinary drama Hillsborough. Tomlinson played the father of a young Liverpool fan who died in the crush, and the scene in which he identified the body was enough to make grown men weep and large buildings crumble. He was thinking, he later said, of what it would be like to look down at the corpses of his own children - two grown-up sons and a daughter, from a marriage long over.

Tomlinson has never been taught how to act. Rather, his skills were refined - if refined is the word - in the drama school of life. Or to put it another way, the first half of his life was in many respects an elaborate dress rehearsal for the second. He was born in a momentous month - September 1939 - yet seemed destined for a less-than-momentous existence. There wasn't much money around. His father was a baker who worked nights and consequently saw little of his family. Young Ricky was a bright lad, but his ambition was punctured by peer pressure. Having passed the 13-plus to get into grammar school, he yearned to go on to a commercial college to study shorthand and typing. "But because of my background, that would have been the equivalent of announcing I was gay," he has said.

Instead, he trained as a plasterer, and developed some robust, not to say downright unpleasant, political opinions. To his subsequent shame - "least said, soonest mended" is his standard line on the subject - he for a brief time joined the National Front.

However, the pendulum then swung resoundingly in the opposite direction, and he found himself with a reputation as a left-wing rabble rouser. In 1972 he was charged with conspiracy to incite violence during a strike in Shrewsbury. He received a two-year jail sentence and was not a model prisoner. It is often said - by him as much as anyone - that in Jim Royle he is basically playing himself. Yet in Stafford Prison he was anything but idle, encouraging his fellow-inmates to protest about the quality of meals, refusing to wear prison uniform, staging a 22-day hunger strike, and generally making such a nuisance of himself that he was clapped in solitary confinement. At the same time, however, he read The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist, discovered Radio 4, and even developed a taste for classical music and opera. When he came out, in 1975, he was a changed man.

The building trade had blacklisted him, so he commandeered his native Liverpudlian wit, dusted off his banjo, and went to work as a latter-day minstrel and stand-up comic, calling himself Hobo Rick. He got his Equity card, then answered an advertisement in the Liverpool Echo, placed by the film director Roland Joffe, for an actor with trade-union experience.

Tomlinson likes to recall that when he got to the audition, having walked half-way across London, his feet were bleeding. And when a chic young casting director in a bomber-jacket asked him if he knew what it was like to be skint, he apparently showed him his bloodied feet and said "that's not fucking nail varnish!" He then added "you can stick your job up your arse!" Arses loom large in Tomlinson's vocabulary, as they do in Jim Royle's.

Unlike Jim, though, he likes to be self-deprecating. His story of the Joffe audition continues with him storming out, then apologetically returning 10 minutes later to ask for his expenses. Similarly, after he got the job, in the film United Kingdom, he recalls being taken to a showbiz party where he was introduced to Joffe's friend Robert De Niro, and "asked him, big daft sod that I am, if he was in the business".

There are some who suggest Tomlinson's naivety about the acting profession is a kind of inverted affectation, that by boasting of not recognising Robert De Niro he is trying to sustain his credibility with his plasterer mates back on Merseyside. They also point to his tendency to take a carrier bag containing four cans of Sainsbury's mild into every black-tie awards ceremony, of which there have many since The Royle Family was born. He even took a supply of mild to the Venice Film Festival. But those who know him best say it's not affectation, it's just he can't stand champagne and happens to like mild.

He's not making some statement by living within a mile of where he was brought up, it's just that he likes that part of Liverpool. He is not posturing by driving around the city in a rickety, D-reg Renault van, he is simply very fond of it (and he does have a snazzy little Volkswagen too). And he continues to spend his holidays on a caravan site in Benidorm because he likes the people there (although he shelled out this summer to take his partner Rita, a social worker, on a "posh" Mediterranean cruise).

He is genuinely, they say, a working-class hero. Certainly, he is held in high regard within his community in Liverpool, where he is frequently to be found opening corner shops and dishing out prizes to kiddies' football teams. For years he has spent two nights a week at the home of an elderly friend, Eddie Ross, playing enthusiastic games of Scrabble (and doubtless trying to land A-R-S-E on a triple word score). He is, moreover, endearingly diligent about dealing with his ever-increasing fan mail, sitting down for hours every weekend composing personal replies.

He must have thought that the fan mail would stop when he left Brookside. He was cast as Bobby Grant when the serial began in 1982, and Neil Kinnock later told him that he acted like a party political broadcast on behalf of the Labour Party, which he took as a compliment.

Since the political extremism, both right and left, of his 20s and 30s, Tomlinson has settled on the mid-left. Yet he is as outspoken as ever, and delighted the tabloids during the making of McGovern's Dockers, by laying in to his fellow Liverpudlian Cilla Black. He claimed that Cilla had betrayed her roots by supporting Margaret Thatcher during the dockers' strike. "I don't know whether she's got a conscience, but she's got to live with it forever," he said. "Her dad was a docker."

Ironically, Tomlinson himself played a strike-breaker, a reviled scab, in that drama. It was an interesting piece of casting, considering that in his plastering days Tomlinson had once handed in his notice on the day after a building dispute came to an end, rather than work alongside men who had not stood on the picket line. Moreover, as McGovern, a former Brookside writer, knew full well, Tomlinson had quit the soap over plans to make Bobby corrupt.

He had stormed off the set abruptly, one Wednesday. "I felt I would have been selling out my class," he said, later adding insult to injury by telling an interviewer that he preferred Coronation Street. "On Brookie we've had killer bugs, sieges and bodies under the patio," he said. "All we need to do is find Shergar and Hitler and we've got the full gamut."

Nevertheless, Tomlinson was hit hard by his departure from Brookside, especially as it came during a tempestuous period in his life. He was getting divorced, there had been some nasty publicity about his relationship with a teenage girl, and he had lost a shedload of money in a failed nightclub venture. His saviour was Ken Loach who offered him a part in Riff-Raff, as a builder. As usual, Tomlinson's performance was so natural that he seemed to be making it up as he went along. His career duly chugged back into life, and he was cast in a BBC oil rig drama, Roughnecks, then as Chief Superintendent Wise, investigating the murder of his predecessor, Bilborough, in McGovern's remarkable Cracker.

Watching and admiring all this was the rapidly rising writer-performer Caroline Aherne, who had long yearned to write a comedy about a family who did nothing but sit in front of the telly slagging each other off, yet full of love for each other. She didn't know Tomlinson, but decided that he would be perfect as her father. And when she literally bumped into him at an awards dinner in Manchester, she told him so. Tomlinson has recounted the incident many times. "I'd had a drink and Caroline had had a drink, and when she bumped into me and said 'ooh, Ricky Tomlinson, you're my dad, you are, and Sue Johnston's my mum'. I thought 'who's had too much to drink, me or her?'"

Tomlinson thought little more of the encounter until a year later when he was offered the part of Jim Royle. He loved the idea of teaming up again with Johnston, who had played Bobby's wife, Sheila, in Brookside. But more to the point, he loved the script.

"Everybody can see a bit of themselves in Jim," he said recently. "People ask how much of me is in Jim. But the real question is how much of Jim is in me? I go home of an evening and don't budge from my chair. I have the remote in my hand and I'm glued to the bloody telly. And I'm just as stingy as Jim. There's only Rita and me in the house and I go bloody bonkers whenever the phone bill comes in."

Tomlinson settled into the role as effortlessly as Jim into his armchair. Which was just as well, for Aherne insists that the project would not have gone ahead had Tomlinson declined. Instead, it has become a smash hit, an atomic weapon in the BBC's ratings war against ITV, which is ironic, considering that it is made by Granada.

On Monday, with the Nine o'Clock News finally interred, the third series of The Royle Family stars in a 9pm double-header with One Foot In The Grave. Having had a sneak preview of two episodes, I can say with some certainty that it will be garlanded with yet more awards. And that, at the black-tie do, a hapless waiter will offer to fill Ricky Tomlinson's glass with champagne, and that he will take a long swig of Sainsbury's mild and say "champagne, my arse!"