SMARTING COMPSTON
Martin Compston has revealed he landed in hospital while filming medical drama The Royal after falling out of an ambulance.
The Line Of Duty star was treated for concussion after banging his head when a gurney he was strapped to slid out of the vehicle.
The ambulance had been left parked on a slope and extras on the set who were playing paramedics forgot to lock it.
Compston sa id he “zoomed” out of the back door while strapped to the wheeled stretcher and fell five feet before hitting the ground.
The 38- year- old had landed a part in the ITV Heartbeat spin-off in 2003 shortly after his breakthrough role in the Ken Loach film Sweet Sixteen.
Comps ton said: “I was playing a character who was suicidal and threw himself off a cliff. They found me on the cliff and I was knocked out. “I was outside this old ambulance on a gurney and there’s a scene where the doctors and the police are talking about how this could have happened.
“The ambulance was parked on a slope with the nose pointing up the way.
“The paramedics were just extras – they weren’t medically trained. I was strapped to this old-school gurney and they put me in the back of the ambulance but they didn’t lock the thing.
“I’m strapped and I just feel myself going backwards out of this ambulance. I zoomed out of the back and smashed my head after about a five foot drop. I then actually had to go to hospital for concussion, ironically, from being in an ambulance on a set.”
Speaking on his Restless Natives podcast, the TV star, who grew up in Greenock, added: “It’s that funny thing as an actor, until somebody shouts ‘cut’, you just keep going. I probably should have went, ‘Do these guys know what they’re doing?’ But you don’t think about it, you just trust that everything is alright.”
Amazon Prime has confirmed a second series of The Rig, a supernatural thriller starring Compston as one of a group of oil workers fighting for survival after a strange fog cuts off communication with the shore.