Pints for paints
Family and Bobby Grant in Brookside, he really did have a rags-toriches rise to fame.
He worked on building sites during the day while playing the banjo and doing stand-up in tough working men’s clubs at night.
After being jailed in the 1970s he emerged from prison penniless and unemployable. He recalls: “I was blacklisted from every building site in the north. Then I saw an advert asking for extras who had trade union and strike experience. Me and a mate drove down to London the next day.
“That was when the director Roland Joffe walked into my life. I had a bit of row with the fella and I stormed out. I thought I’d blown it. Then, out of the blue, he called me and ask if I could do a workshop.
“I turned up with a joiner and a van loaded with building materials. I thought he wanted me to build the bloody thing!”
Joffe cast Ricky in what was to become an award-winning drama called United Kingdom. Screenwriter and maverick TV entrepreneur Phil Redmond spotted
him in it and signed him up for the part of Bobby Grant. One role that struck a particularly poignant chord with him was that of tragic dad John Glover in Jimmy McGovern’s film Hillsborough.
It echoed the death of his own son Clinton – one of three children with ex-wife Marlene – after a long battle with drink. Ricky says: “John Glover lost his son Ian at Hillsborough and his other son Joe has carried the scars of that terrible day. I know how it feels to lose a child.”
The star believes he was made for the part of Jim Royle, playing the layabout dad alongside Sue Johnston, Craig Cash and Caroline Aherne, who died in 2016 aged 52.
He says: “Meeting Caroline and playing Jim Royle was a once-in-alifetime opportunity. Caroline was such a wonderfully warm human being. She was a great British talent and is sadly missed.”
Unlike TV tightwad Jim, Ricky has given a fortune to charities and made sure his family are debt-free by paying off all their mortgages.
His talents are still in demand too, though he says no sometimes.
He says: “One of the big online gambling companies approached me to do an advert, but I said no. I don’t gamble. I didn’t want to know.”
A Royle reunion is on the cards with Jim and Antony, played by Ralf Little, coming together for a new six- part show called Ricky And Ralf ’s Very Northern Road Trip.
Ricky laughs: “We’re sharing a campervan. We were in Blackpool and I told him the Ferris wheel was the UK’s biggest. I’ve been narrating a series called Made in Britain so he reckoned I knew my stuff.
“He looked at me and said, ‘Really? I didn’t know that’. And I said to him, ‘ Yes – you should see the size of the bloody hamster!’
“With my gravelly voice and Scouse accent, who’d have thought that I’d be a voice-over star? But Made in Britain is brilliant.”
The 10-part series looks at how iconic brands – such as Bird’s Eye frozen peas and Aunt Bessie’s yorkshire puddings – are made.
Made in Britain, ITV4, Wednesdays at 8pm, or catch up on the ITV Hub.
Getting to meet Caroline and playing Jim was once in a lifetime opportunity