The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Reborn in paradise Ralf Little talks to Craig Mclean about his biggest role to date
‘I survive difficult stuff by burying it. Therapists would have a field day with me’
It’s a long way from a stuffy Manchester front room to the (fictional) Caribbean island of Saint Marie. But Ralf Little – once the put-upon teen Antony in The Royle Family – has put away a dark family past and his tearaway 20s to enjoy a new grown-up life and a TV role with eight million viewers.
By Craig Mclean
It’s a sunny winter morning – another one – in the Caribbean, and Ralf Little is taking time out from jet-skiing for our photo shoot and interview. The English actor, looking relaxed in football shorts and T-shirt, is talking from the terrace of his villa, albeit with an intermittent connection that causes Zoom to jitter and freeze.
‘It is funny – you do complain that the Wi-fi’s really unstable, and sometimes the electrics go in a storm,’ he says, well versed in island life having been on Guadeloupe since mid-july. Equally, food hygiene in the tropics is fraught with peril: ‘You can’t leave even a crumb out after cooking ’cause 10 minutes later there’ll be a mound of ants all over it.’
But Little readily appreciates that pity will be in short supply, as he swapped the grimmest winter in living memory for a long stint in paradise. Accordingly, the 40-yearold will not be ‘whingeing’ about his lot. As, in addition to enjoying the beachside activities relayed in his funny Instagram posts (which include him swapping clothes, and dance moves, with one of the female cast for a Tiktok-inspired routine), he’s well aware how spoiled he is by the location.
‘That’s my view I wake up to in the morning,’ he says, turning the screen to show me an idyllic bay with bobbing boats and, very much out of shot, the ‘500 dolphins and two sperm whales, just breaching as I went past’ that he spotted on a trip out into the crystalblue waters the other week.
‘I never thought I’d see that in my entire life!’ he gasps, his Mancunian accent strengthening the more we talk. ‘I thought: how is a lad from Bury watching this?’
A lad from Bury is watching this – and, to be scrupulously fair, only on his rare days off – because Little has spent the last six months on Guadeloupe working on what he calls ‘the biggest acting job I’ve ever done’.
The actor shot to fame aged 18 in his first job, playing put-upon son Antony in The Royle Family before becoming a 20-something comedy hero in six series of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. He is now the lead in Death in Paradise, the BBC’S much loved detective series, which this year celebrates its 10th anniversary
Little is Detective Inspector Neville Parker. A detail-obsessed, sun-phobic northerner with a rash of allergies that can make him prickly in both senses of the word, he’s the latest fish-out-of-water British policeman to pitch up in Saint Marie, a fictional Caribbean island with an outsized, statistically baffling homicide problem.
He made his debut in the show early last year, following in the footsteps of Ardal O’hanlon, Kris Marshall and Ben Miller. An immediate hit with Death in Paradise’s loyal eight million viewers, he’s spent most of lockdown 2020 filming his second series. While critics are constantly bemused by its extraordinary success – it’s one of the top 10 most-watched shows on terrestrial TV – the detective drama’s particular appeal of escapism, simplicity and sunshine will resonate even louder this winter. The format, or even formula, is exactly the kind of predictable reassurance we need right now.
‘What viewers really enjoy is the fact that every episode is wrapped up – it’s neat and tidy’ says Little. ‘That’s going to be really important to people. Because right now life is anything but neat and tidy.’
Making a show whose comfort-viewing cosiness has proven a hit in 236 TV territories is hard work. ‘It’s a tough, exhausting, physically demanding job in a way that you would never think, with the cumulative effect of being up at 5.30am, working over 12 hours a day, for five-and-a-half months.’ Then there are the challenges of working in the heat, and the humidity that comes with downpours. ‘It is not a cakewalk,’ Little says, ‘but I’m still having the most amazing time on the most amazing job.’
Still, even paradise isn’t immune to a global pandemic. The show has a full-time Covid supervisor; cast and crew are regularly tested (another of Little’s Insta posts shows him having a brain-tickling nasal swab); and off-set, there is considerably less socialising than normal. In fact, so strict are the rules that Little’s only week off the island all year required some invention.
Desperate to see his American, New Yorkbased girlfriend, playwright Lindsey Ferrentino, 31, the couple figured out that he could take a one-hour flight from Guadeloupe, which is an overseas French department, to the divided island of Sint Maarten/ Saint-martin, which is half-french. Then Ferrentino could take advantage of the US’S air bridge to the Netherlands and fly to the other half, a Dutch territory.
‘So we were able to meet in the middle and have a week’s holiday together,’ he says. Alas, that legally sound work-around wasn’t good enough for the show’s strict protocols. ‘I got told off,’ he adds ruefully, the producers informing him ‘he’d made a mistake’, to which he replied, through gritted teeth, ‘Yes, I’m aware of this.’
When he was hired in May 2019 after a single 30-minute audition, Little was challenged with embodying both change and continuity. ‘Every lead character we’ve had up till now is broken in some way – they need to be on this island to be healed,’ explains the show’s long standing producer Tim Key. ‘But with Ralf, there was a deliberate attempt to inject a bit of spice back into it. Ardal and Kris played very likeable characters, so with Neville we wanted to create a character it was OK to find frustrating from time to time.’
All three of his predecessors, though, had family commitments back in the UK, meaning that eventually the appeal of spending half the year in the Caribbean began to pall. Not so for Little: ‘This particular job suits my particular life circumstances better than it has anyone before me.’
He has not been back to the UK since the summer, and admits that he might not go straight home when filming finishes a week after our interview – his best chance of seeing his girlfriend for only the second time since before lockdown is to fly to America before returning to Europe.
Describing himself as ‘quite a nomad’, long used to being away from his parents and siblings, he says, ‘I don’t have any kids or responsibilities that have anchored me particularly in one place. And while, technically, I have a house in London and I live in England, I go where the work is.’
That work has been pretty consistent since he embarked on a professional career
aged 17. The son of accountants, Little initially considered training to become a doctor, but he only lasted four weeks studying medicine at Manchester University. Nonetheless Little, an up-for-a-debate tweeter, is a vocal supporter of the NHS, and is well aware of the Covid challenges faced this year by his sister, a nurse, and brother, a doctor.
‘It’s been tough, but they’ve been getting on with it. Like many NHS workers, their [attitude is]: “This is what I trained for. Sometimes we don’t get support from above, but this is what we do and that shouldn’t be taken for granted by governments or any of us.’
Resolutely down-to-earth, Little would never describe his career as a calling, but he has been doing it for well over half his life. He’d been a keen actor while at the fee-paying Bolton School, with some children’s TV roles under his belt. So when he won a part in a new show by actor-writers Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash, he jumped at it.
So enthused was Little to be a part of The Royle Family, in fact, that he didn’t take the time to have his nose properly set after it was broken, a week before filming started, when he tried to break up a fight. ‘And that’s why it still looks like this!’ he laughs, thrusting his wonky nose right into the laptop screen.
For the actors making the show – led by his considerably more experienced co-stars Sue Johnston and Ricky Tomlinson – they were aware in the moment, ‘after we’d filmed an episode, that we knew we had something special’.
As for Antony, Little takes little credit for his still-iconic status. ‘People ask how I brought this character to life. But it was so perfectly written and the dialogue was so good. I don’t feel like I can take any credit. I was just lucky to be there.’
Little couldn’t have wished for a more supportive environment. ‘It was obvious very quickly that The Royle Family had more camaraderie than any show you could ever imagine,’ he reflects now. ‘It was such a unique blend of personalities and characters, and Caroline was just a special person,’ he says fondly of Aherne, who died of cancer in 2016 aged 52. ‘It really mattered to her that people were happy and enjoyed themselves on set. That was really formative to me as a 17-year-old.’
That, Key points out, has stood him in good stead. ‘When Ralf first came on board, we talked about his experience on The Royle Family, and that team-player atmosphere. As the face of the show, you set the tone for the crew and for the guest cast when they fly
In his 20s, he was typecast, he acknowledges, as a ‘thick, drunk, slobby loser’
out. I always tell the actors, [the work] is 50 per cent on-screen and 50 per cent offscreen. You’re asking somebody to be an ambassador for the show in every sense.’
Little bounced straight from one ostensibly parochial northern BBC sitcom with outsized resonance to another – starting in 2001, he appeared in Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, acting alongside Will Mellor (with whom he now hosts a hit podcast, Two Pints with Will and Ralf ) and Sheridan Smith.
He was, by his mid-20s, a big star of the small screen, and had the kind of fun you might expect of a young man with lots of money and a modicum of fame. ‘I had a great time!’ he beams, adding that his rise was far from vertiginous. ‘It took a year for people to notice me on the street. Nowadays, if you’re in X Factor or Strictly, overnight people know who you are. But back in those days there was no social media.’
Something he was probably glad of, as there was the occasional drunken/romantic antic reported on the gossip pages – ‘A sexy lapdancer has revealed how Royle Family star Ralf Little was a BIG surprise during their wild nights of passion’, for example. He later discovered his mobile phone had been hacked by the tabloids for 12 years. It was a skewed situation that also meant the melding of his on-screen roles with his off-screen self: he was typecast, he later acknowledged, as a ‘thick, drunk, slobby loser’.
Reflecting now, however, he only has fun memories of his 20s. He made enough money to eventually buy a BMW i8, a gull-winged electric sports car that costs some £115,000, only reluctantly selling it last year. ‘Growing up is boring,’ read the accompanying Instagram post.
Yes, there were invitations to parties and industry events. ‘But the main thing is, I got to play at Wembley Stadium!’
As a footballer good enough to have played semi-professionally, those were the key dividends of Little’s success. ‘I started playing for the Arsenal Ex-pros when I was 20 because I lived in London, and still play for them now – as a Man United fan,’ he winces. ‘Those are experiences that have been most extraordinary to me: the places I’ve got to play, the legends I’ve got to play with,’ he says, recalling matches with the likes of Paul Gascoigne and Bryan Robson.
Still, it’s clear that, by the age of 27, he was seeking a reset when he asked to have his Two Pints character killed off. By leaving a well-paid established gig, he wanted to ‘announce to the world and the industry that I’m not the kid from The Royle Family any more. Two Pints is a great show for young people, but now I’m stepping out, I’m making this decision as a grown man, so let’s come and do some new grown-up roles.
‘And I don’t know if it was necessarily the right decision, looking back,’ he says pointing out that his co-star Sheridan Smith did another two series, ‘pocketed the pay cheque, and it’s not held her back! She’s had an extraordinary career.’
It’s his way of acknowledging that, really, he’d have to wait another 12 years (a period filled with parts in British films, plus one-off drama and theatre roles), till Death in Paradise came along.
But as Little points out, he’s not one of life’s worriers. ‘I’m the kind of person who survives difficult stuff by not thinking about it – by burying it in a deeply unhealthy way,’ he says. ‘I used to think what a great trait that was. But as I’ve got older, I’m thinking, “maybe therapists would have a field day with me,” saying, “You don’t process any of the s—t you should be dealing with.”’
At the risk of making too big an amateur-therapist leap, it’s hard not to imagine that his attitude stems at least in part, from the death of his oldest sister when he was
‘What if people hate it? I crammed six months’ anxiety into 15 minutes’
nine. Ceridwen fell off a cliff during a camping trip in Cornwall. The family was torn apart: his mother’s relationship with her parents, with whom the children were on holiday at the time, was never the same. Little’s parents’ relationship ended eight years later. Two years ago the actor said: ‘Bless ’em, I wish for them they’d split up about six years previously because every time they looked at each other they were just heartbroken. They stuck together for our benefit.’
It’s no wonder, perhaps, that Little espouses positivity as much as he can these days. ‘It’s important to me to be the kind of person who’s not blithely putting my head in the sand but is saying: things tend to work themselves out. The world’s too scary a place for me if I don’t do that.’
And it seems that this attitude has enabled Little to push through half-a-year’s filming and isolation with hard work and little angst.
It was working overdrive, too, when he made his Death in Paradise debut on BBC One in February last year. Luckily, the airing of his first episode fell in the week of his 40th birthday, which helped calm any nerves. ‘Just before it was on air, I went: ‘Oh my God, Death in Paradise is on tonight!’ That was the first time I emotionally connected to the weight of it. I was suddenly a mess: ‘What if people hate it? What if I’m not good in it?’ I crammed six months’ anxiety into 15 minutes.
‘I couldn’t watch it. So I put on Rick and Morty on Netflix instead. The responsibility was too much.’ At about 9.15, his ‘missus’ called him from America, where she’d been keeping an eye on social media. ‘Don’t worry,’ Ferrentino told him. ‘I’ve been monitoring Twitter – you’re a hit. So you can crawl out from under your rock.’
Little laughs uproariously as he relates the exact words of his girlfriend. In fact, he clarifies, they’re engaged, but ‘who knows?’ when they can marry. ‘When the world has some sense of normality and I’m not stuck in the Caribbean for five months?’ he wonders.
The couple might have to wait a while longer. At time of writing, the BBC has yet to recommission Death in Paradise for an 11th series. That, though, seems a shoo-in, as does Little’s rehiring. Certainly he’s keeping his diary clear just in case. The job, for him, comes first – so much so that even that halfformed plan, once filming wraps on this series, to see his girlfriend in New York is far from confirmed.
‘Oh, let’s be clear: if another acting gig comes along, I ain’t going to America!’ he laughs again. ‘I love working. I’m not really bothered about holidays.’
Death in Paradise airs on Thursdays on BBC One at 9 pm, and is available on iplayer