Good karma waits for Neil

IT’S 24 years since Men Behaving Badly hit TV and Neil Morrissey says he feels he has finally been accepted as a dramatic actor. The 54-year-old, who played dopey Tony in the BBC sitcom alongside Martin

Clunes, stars in ITV’s new medical drama The Good Karma Hospital and feels he has come a long way.

“We had such a big hit with the comedy that it is difficult to shake off the shackles in terms of what a TV audience expects – and therefore expectations of producers,” Neil, right, told Day & Night.

“Then there are the ones brave enough to give you a chance to play something which has charm and intellect and still has a tongue in the cheek. It’s nice to play both sides of the coin.”

But Neil – who plays a roguish expat who runs a beach bar, and spent 12 weeks filming the series in Sri Lanka alongside co-star Amanda Redman – still brought the laughs off set.

“No matter where you are in the world it’s still a job,” he said of the drama, set in a South India cottage hospital, which begins tomorrow

“You’ve still got to get your lines in your head and prepare but you’re in Sri Lanka so you have days off.

“When any new cast member arrived we would tell them which restaurant we were at but we’d say, ‘If you want to go through lines or anything, you’re boring!’ I know from being in a long-running series that when people come in there’s a certain amount of nervousness. So we wanted to have fun.”