Who’s who of stars
The lives and loves of the characters who inhabit this latest Titanic tale are put under the spotlight by David Stephenson. He takes a close look at the upstairsdownstairs world of the doomed ship, from the ultra rich John Astor to the Second Class stewar
DRAGGING himself from one of the immersion tanks on set, the son of Coronation Street’s William Roache looks surprisingly “dry”.
“The tank’s not too bad,” he says. “It’s not icy or anything. It’s only four feet deep so you can kind of walk around in it and you don’t have to float too much. But being in the tank is quite a thrill. I have never done tank work before.”
His character is a fictitious one. “He is obviously representing the ‘upstairs’ of this Titanic trip but he is an interesting man, quite progressive. Julian [Fellowes] has written him a little more progressively than I would have imagined for the period. The earl is very mildly saying we don’t need empires any more so it has made the character a little less stiff. Sometimes with these characters, you can feel like you’ve got an iron rod up your back.
“Fellowes’ story makes us all think of how we would react in such a situation.
“It turns out that the Earl of Manton may have been quite heroic,” says Roache. “The best of him comes to the fore.
“You are probably watching this show, wondering which way this guy is going to go. Would he just jump in this lifeboat on his own? It seems that he actually puts everybody before himself.”
Manton is the first “toff” character Roache has played. “I suppose in The Gathering Storm I played a civil servant but otherwise this is the first time I have played someone like this. It was quite a challenge for me.”