AT LAST, I CAN BE A SHOWBIZ SHOW-OFF

DANIEL Blake star Dave Johns isn’t aware of it all, but as we drink tea in a comedy club café in his home town of Newcastle, he constantly bobs up and down on his seat.

Not exactly Tigger-bobbing, more like a very big baby in a high chair.

The kinetic energy suggests a man who needs to be on the go, always moving forward.

And it’s no surprise to learn he has three new films coming out over the months ahead, as well as returning to the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time in 18 years.

But what’s more of a surprise, given his talent and energy, is that Dave Johns was 36 before he first took to the stage as a stand-up.

He was 59 before he became a film star – “the first ever called Dave” – with Ken Loach’s multi- award-winning benefits scandal story.

Today, on his 61st birthday, Dave rewinds on his long journey to showbiz success and you realise it’s taken so long because the road ahead was heavily potholed.

And, the father of a teenage daughter reveals, manholed.

Schooldays revealed the shy little boy from working-class Byker was far from academic. “In the maths class the teacher would give me a bit of paper and I’d draw airplanes,” he recalls.

Dave also had a distinctive stammer and his future looked bleak, but one day the clouds parted. Just a little. He tried youth theatre in Wallsend and loved it.

But the curtain on this world came down almost as fast as it had gone up.

“My mates thought this acting stuff was weird and reckoned I had become a total w***er.”

He adds, with a shrug: “My parents certainly didn’t encourage performance. My dad’s mantra was ‘Stop showing off’ and that stuck with me for the longest time.”

Dave’s father was a joiner. “When I left school at 15, he told me he had an interview set up for me as an apprentice bricklayer.”

And so Johns slapped mortar on to bricks. Badly.

“Rather than let me build houses on the new estates, the building company told me to build manholes. That’s all I did for two years, on my own.”

He grins: “In a way it was good because I would put on Radio 1 and if it was sunny I’d lie in the sunshine.”

After serving his apprenticeship, Dave drifted into a range of jobs. But he felt the pull of the performance world.

“One day I saw an ad for the Tyne Theatre and Opera House, who were looking for someone to work the flies and build the sets.”