Kate Copstick

After the auditions, Johns was back to thinking about donkey licences, “when Ken phoned me up and said, ‘Will you be in my film?’” He shrugs like he’s still amazed about it.

“When they phoned up to negotiate I said, ‘Now, I don’t have an agent, so don’t go diddlin’ us!’” He giggles. “As if Ken Loach would do that. Anyway, when they told me how much I thought, ‘Wow, that’s saved my bacon… I could buy all the donkeys I wanted’.”

Loach, Johns says, likes working with comics. “He says stand-ups are really good at communicating.”

And communication is key. “Ken took me on one side and he says ‘in every scene Dave, all you have to do is listen. If you listen to each other and get the right emotion, it will look right on the screen’. And I said, ‘Alright, I’ll do that then!’” And he did.

While the narrative of a Loach film might be constructed, the emotions are all real.

“He doesn’t give you a script,” says Dave. “So I didn’t know the end till a couple of days before we finished.” He is obviously a fan of the Loach Method. “He only gives you a couple of pages at a time because then you can’t get together and go, ‘Our big scene’s coming up on page 38… we’ll do it like this’.

“That scene where I go to the brothel to find Hayley,” says Dave, “he’d kept me apart from her for, like, four days and I was feelin, like, sorta deprived of seeing her – Hayley – and so when I went there and I knew I was going to see her I felt as if… like, it was my daughter, and when I go in through the door and when I saw her in all the… fancy underwear… and she said, ‘Oh no, Mr Blake, you shouldn’t be seeing me like this’… I just couldn’t… the tears just came… cos I was thinking, ‘What the f*** are you doing, you don’t have to do that.’” He nods. “And Ken did that because he says you can’t fake shock.”

But while the emotions were natural, some things simply had to be learned. “I had to go for two days to this woodwork course to learn how to carve the fish,” says Dave. “I came back to Ken like he was me dad and went, ‘Look what I made!’ and he said, ‘Well done!’ I was really proud.”

The whole DIY aspect of the film came as something of a surprise to his wife. “She said, ‘You’ve never hung a door in yer life’,” he says. But even she was “well impressed” by the fish.

Johns genuinely thought that that might be as much of a result as the film would get. “All I thought was, just make the best job you can… you’ve got the lead in a Ken Loach film. I thought it would be a little arthouse film, a nice little thing to finish with, y’know… show to the grandkids… and then it went to Cannes and it just went… batshit crazy.”

Indeed it did. Thirtyeight awards, including the Palme d’or, Bafta Best British film and Empire Magazine’s Best Newcomer for Johns. Awards are A Good Thing, he thinks. “They keep the film in the public attention. When it won the Palme D’OR they couldn’t dismiss it as leftie shite propaganda, even the rightwing papers, who hated it. It showed the truth.” The strength of the ecstatic reception – a 14-minute standing ovation – took director and cast by surprise. “We were having dinner the night before it was shown and

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