Getting To Know… Ben Miller

The Deathin Paradise star, 55, on why OCD helped him in his latest role…

● I play the title character in a new ITV drama, Professor T. Jasper Tempest is an eccentric criminologist who’s a Cambridge lecturer. He’s got quite peculiar manners and is very OCD – everything in his flat is incredibly neat and he’s phobic about germs. I didn’t have to research that as I had OCD myself quite badly when I was in my twenties. I’ve been lucky that it has reduced as I’ve got older. We’re talking 20 years ago now and I had treatment at the time.

● I feel like this role was made for me because I also went to Cambridge, where Tempest works [Ben read Natural Sciences at Cambridge and began a physics PhD but abandoned it to pursue comedy] . And out of all the buildings they could have chosen in Cambridge to be Professor T’s house, they chose the one where one of my best friends lived. It’s where I wrote the very first sketches that I ever wrote in comedy, and it’s right next to the student theatre where we per formed those sketches. Filming there was surreal.

● There’s a bit of an overlap in the Venn diagram between Professor T and Death in Paradise’s DI Richard Poole. They’re both similar in that they have a lot of difficulty with relationships. But in terms of the actual detective work, they are polar opposites – Poole has no idea whether anybody is telling the truth, whereas Jasper is ver y intuitive and can see instantly whether someone is telling the truth.

STARTS THIS WEEK ON ITV AND ALL EPISODES ARE CURRENTLY AVAILABLE ON BRITBOX.