Thinking outside the box

Actor Peter Davison talks to Jack Watkins about life beyond TV

THE subtitle of Peter Davison’s warmly engaging and honestly insightful autobiography is An Actor Despairs. Don’t tell us the man who endeared himself to the nation as the workshy, often inebriated and lovelorn ball of fun Tristan Farnon in All Creatures Great and Small is really a melancholy soul?

No fear: it’s partly a thespian in-joke, a play on the title of the prime Stanislavski text on the Method, An Actor Prepares, handed out to all drama-school students. ‘When I mention my book’s name to actors, they all say: “Oh! That’s really good”,’ laughs Mr Davison, but, he continues, it also contains a subtler message.

‘It links to my belief that an actor’s level of “despair” is consistent across the board, whether they’re a Hollywood star or unemployed in Frinton-on-sea. Some will say they’ve done wonderfully well, they’ve worked in Northampton rep, they’ve done this and that, but I’ll think, by my standards, they’re not successful at all. Yet they’re really no different from me.

‘I can say I’ve worked consistently for five decades, but I’m not in movies or the really prestigious TV series, because so many film actors have come into that, making it harder for established TV performers. Then again, I was watching an American film last night starring Colin Farrell. Where is he now? Someone we regard as a big name, but he probably feels the same.’

Beyond the insecurity that’s inescapable in his profession, Mr Davison is not depressed. His list of TV credits is certainly impressive, extending beyond All Creatures and being the fifth Doctor Who, to superb, but somehow almost forgotten classics such as A Very Peculiar Practice, in which he played a university doctor; Campion, in which he was the personification of a dashing amateur sleuth; and the gentle, somewhat off-the-wall The Last Detective, in which he was perfect as a wistfully dishevelled copper, to name just a few. Most recently, he’s been playing a seedy character in the current ITV drama Liar.

Until reading his book, I hadn’t appreciated the extent to which he was also a man of the stage. Our interview is at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, not far from his home. It’s a small house, which majors in staging works by new playwrights and rediscovering old classics. Mr Davison is one of its ambassadors, helping it to attract younger and less traditional theatre-going audiences.

‘That’s always a challenge, but what’s appealing here is that, with the stage being in the round, plays are performed naturalistically, whereas in a prosceniumarch theatre, the actor is shouting in the dark,’ he explains. ‘I prefer the intimacy of playing in a venue like this and, for the audience, it’s like watching the telly, but it’s right in front of you.’

The Orange Tree also has some Shakespeare plays coming up and my suggestion that the sight of that name probably gives Mr Davison a faint shiver draws another good laugh. Having read his book, I’ve rightly guessed that, despite starting out in rep, he was never a great one for the classics. It makes it all the more piquant that one of his chief influences, Robert Hardy, who played his elder brother Siegfried in All Creatures and who died earlier this year, nursed a long but forlorn hope that Mr Davison would one day consent to let him direct him in Hamlet.

Hardy was a master in this highest of the acting forms and Mr Davison, who comes from a very different background to a man who could trace his lineage back to King Alfred, felt intimidated when first cast to work with him. Hardy, however, so enjoyed the outcome that he requested extra scenes be inserted into the series for the sparring brothers.

‘He really was extraordinary,’ recalls Mr Davison, pondering the chemistry between them. ‘The reason he had this huge influence on me was that, unlike any other actor I’ve worked with, he never did the same thing twice. He was incapable of it, too excited by all the ways you could do a scene.

‘In rehearsal, he would bark lines at me, six inches from my face, and then whisper them. I had to match that and somehow give as near good as I got. And he obviously liked the fact he could throw this performance at me and I wouldn’t say “What are you doing?”.’

Christopher Timothy, who played James Herriot, became another friend and influence, preaching the virtues of ‘keeping your feet on the ground and not getting carried away when people around you are telling you how brilliant you are’. The pair have been reunited for a documentary series coming soon to Channel 4, putatively titled Vintage Roads, in which they head into the British countryside on the trail of the 20th-century travel writer E. V. Morton.

When Mr Davison was cast, somewhat against his usual niceguy persona, in the ITV drama At Home With The Braithwaites in 2000, the Daily Mail, in that unerring way it has of hitting a jarring note on just about everything, welcomed him back after he’d apparently spent 10 years in the wilderness. ‘I’d no idea that’s where I’d been until they said that,’ he laughs. ‘I’d gone from 1977 to the early 1990s when I was constantly on TV, which is a pretty good run, but I’d started doing more theatre and I’d always been working.’

In fact, he’s been a late flowerer in musicals, appearing in the hit shows Chicago, Legally Blonde and, most recently, Gypsy, for which he received a Best Supporting Actor nomination in the Olivier Awards for 2016. There’s a certain irony in this, because, at the start of his career, he toyed with the idea of becoming a songwriter.

‘I’m musical, I know what’s going on. I don’t have a great voice, but I can hold a tune,’ he says.

‘But I pretty much wait for the people to come to me with parts these days. I’m not out there pushing. The range of roles available to someone my age is quite small.’ He’s realistic you see, but certainly not depressed. Jack Watkins

‘He [Hardy] would bark lines, six inches from my face, and then whisper them ’