BENT COPPERS AND PETROL BOMBS . . .

a Roman Catholic by birth, like his TV persona, Dunbar was born in enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, in 1958, the son of a joiner and the eldest of seven children.

His line Of Duty character, Superintendent Ted Hastings, served with the rUC during the Troubles, a turbulent time which shaped Dunbar’s own formative teenage years.

adrian was ten when his parents, Sean and Pauline, a home-maker with a beautiful singing voice who instilled her son with a love of music, moved to Portadown in Co armagh to find work.

‘ Portadown was the most marginalised of all the Nationalist communities in the North,’ recalled Dunbar.

‘Suddenly we were living in a town where, if you were Catholic, you literally couldn’t walk up the street without getting into some kind of conflict.’ The town, and in particular the Catholic Garvaghy road estate where Dunbar’s family lived, was a dangerous place.

Dunbar has previously recalled how he was dragged out of a sweet shop and beaten up by thugs who knew from his school blazer that he was Catholic. Two policemen who saw what was happening just walked on by.

But that wasn’t the half of it. In an interview in 2000, the actor admitted that as gang culture proliferated, he made petrol bombs from milk bottles (he didn’t throw them; that was the big boys) to defend his estate.

‘We lived in this ghetto during the worst excesses of the Seventies,’ he said. ‘When the tartan gangs came to wreck our estate, we had to defend it. We were barricaded in with diggers and earth-movers.

‘It wasn’t a case of joining the republican cause, or the Ira — we were fighting for our very existence.’ as the Troubles exploded, the Dunbar family moved back to enniskillen.