Corrie Geoff on serving up his TV wife’s pet chicken, death threats and being a soap villain

Such reactions should be sweet reward for an actor. But Ian Bartholomew, who plays Metcalfe, said it can bring problems from people unable to distinguish him from his character.

He said: “A coach driver at my children’s school stopped me the other day and said, ‘It’s a good job my wife isn’t driving this bus. She’d have run you over.’

“Being disliked comes with the territory. I don’t mind if people hate him. I think they should, as long as they’re not hating Ian. They know that I’m not like that.”

Ian said it had been challenging playing someone so irredeemably vile and unpleasant.

“He’s now becoming not just manipulative but mean and nasty and intentionally so. Killing her chicken is a turning point, because he starts to enjoy his cruelty in some twisted, perverse way.

“I’m finding it hard and there are uncomfortable scenes, such as when he pushed his phone into Yasmeen’s face to film her. I have to put Geoff in a box and open it when I need it.”

Ian, 65, who lives in Cheshire with his theatre director wife Loveday Ingram and a daughter, aged 15, and a son, 12, said men from his generation have been fighting hundreds of years of Ian insists the harrowing scenes social conditioning dictating that are necessary to help tackle real men are the breadwinners and at life abuse. Coercive control, illegal the centre of the family. in England and Wales since 2015,

Playing Metcalfe means humiliating, turns that on its head intimidating, isolating with Ian saying: “I and scaring victims.

A coach

indulge my chauvinistic, Ian said: “If this

driver at school said misogynistic, storyline gives just misanthropic self to one viewer the

his wife wanted to

play the part.” opportunity to In some of the recognise they’re in

run me over

most shocking scenes that sort of he locked her in his relationship and do magician’s box and left the something about it, then house. we’ve done a good job.”

The gradual abuse has eroded Ian has looked at his own Yasmeen’s confidence and has behaviour in light of the plot. prompted viewers’ complaints but He said: “It’s made me think

– I do that, I can be sharp. I don’t take it anything like as far as Geoff does but I know that I can be quite controlling and quite dismissive of other people.

“It has made me change my behaviour at home. I like to think I’m less judgmental now.”

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Since Yasmeen, played by Shelley King, was put in a box Ian’s kids can no longer watch their dad on Corrie.

And playing manipulative Metcalfe has been a baptism of fire for jobbing actor Ian, whose former lower key roles over 40 years include parts in shows such