Actor Robert Lindsay on his role in Sherwood and growing up in a mining town: ‘There were terrible confrontations between fathers and sons’

I find Robert Lindsay – I almost trip over him – on a pavement outside Marylebone station just across the street from the hotel where we are to meet. Oh dear. I never know what to do in these situations. Should I feign short-sightedness, and make my way smoothly to the air-conditioned atrium where a discreet table has been booked for us by a publicist? Or should I take the risk and introduce myself now? In the end, I decide there’s nothing for it. We’re practically eye-balling; he might recognise me later and wonder why I scooted past so rudely. Also, he looks kind of anxious, his bag at his feet, his hands patting his pockets. Maybe he’s lost, and needs me to rescue him?

But, no. What I take for anxiety is merely the slight shiftiness of the 21st-century smoker. “Just let me have a cigarette,” he says, once I’ve explained who I am. “Do you mind?” He takes three quick drags – the action is darting and delicate, like a swan going after breadcrumbs at the park – and chucks what’s left in the bin. Then we cross the road together, his hand tight on my upper arm, the better to keep us safe from all the taxis and Deliveroo men. “Ah!” he exhales. “I’m so glad we decided to meet here, and not [at this point, a slight adjustment in the voice] in King’s Cross …” Marylebone, he tells me, is extremely convenient because he lives in Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire, and this is where the London train tips him out. Later, I look up Gerrards Cross. It sounds luxe. It gets a namecheck in a sketch from the very first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus , and also in a song by prog-rock band Jethro Tull .

At our table, he asks for a pot of tea, and I carefully take him in. It’s rather a splendid sight: full head of hair, navy knitted shirt, cream not-quite-linen trousers, English brogues. He looks smooth, dandyish . Although he’ll gently complain about his age (he is 74), bemoaning the fact that for the first time in his life the prospect of doing seven theatre shows a week is exhausting (he’s in talks about playing Prospero in The Tempest ), I can’t take any of it very seriously. To my eyes – I’m old enough to have grown up with him – he’s more or less unchanged. Lindsay has always had a very particular energy as an actor; his fortes are neuroticism, menace and a certain kind of Pooterish thin-skinned-ness; in musicals, he is a trouper par excellence. And this zing is palpable now. His manner is eager, confiding, a bit gossipy. If some of his stories are a touch burnished at this point, they’re also wildly entertaining. Put it this way: we both laugh at his punchlines.

My character goes to the core of the trouble. He’s a man out of his time, a very wealthy man, and, of course, he’s based on someone real

Lindsay is one of several actors who have joined the cast of James Graham’s BBC series Sherwood for its second series (among the others are Stephen Dillane, Monica Dolan and David Harewood). Given the huge success of the show’s first outing, it’s a gig that is both a gift and something of a responsibility for anyone involved. But for Lindsay, the job has a special resonance. Sherwood is set in a small town in Nottinghamshire, an area painfully divided during the miners’ strike of 1984-85 (many men in Nottinghamshire and nearby Derbyshire continued to work, in the face of ostracism and sometimes much worse in their communities), and this happens to be territory he knows well. He grew up in Ilkeston, on the border of the two counties, and as a boy was taken to a miners’ holiday camp – Butlin’s was too expensive – by his trade-unionist father. Sherwood was always going to be irresistible to him; this, he tells me, is the first time in a long career that he has ever been able to deploy his own accent for a role.

But what is his own accent? Since drama school, the voice has been RP, his crisp consonants and elongated vowels adopted ostensibly at the insistence of a voice tutor, who said he would need it for Shakespeare, but perhaps also for reasons that have more to do with social class than with art. “You’ve made me say it,” he’ll tell me, when I push him on this. “If I’m being really honest, yes, it was a class thing. I wanted to be a little better than where I came from.” For a moment, he sounds almost startled by this semi-revelation. “I was told I could be other people [with RP]: that the world would be my oyster, that I could play a thousand characters – and that’s what I’ve always said about it, that it was just for acting. But you’ve opened my eyes to something. Yes, I wanted to be approved of, I think, to elevate my position…”

Either way, he’s channelling the East Midlands in Sherwood , a role that came about thanks in part to Alan Bleasdale, in whose 1991 Channel 4 drama, GBH , Lindsay famously starred as a snarling and paranoid hard-left council leader (he also appeared in a later Bleasdale project, Jake’s Progress , but it’s GBH everyone remembers). James Graham had been in close touch with Bleasdale, having adapted his Boys from the Black Stuff for the stage , and at some point the older writer suggested to him that he should cast Lindsay, “a local lad”. Graham rang Lindsay, and at a lunch told him there might be a part in Sherwood for him, at which point the actor had to admit that he hadn’t seen the first series: “I went home and binge-watched it on my iPad, and, oh my god…” It’s good, isn’t it? He’s shaking his head. “Yes, it really is.”

I’ve seen only two episodes of the new series; Graham’s plotting is knotty, and Lindsay is not centre stage until later on. Is he playing a goodie or a baddie? The latter, I would say: a flash local-born millionaire who returns to Nottingham to open an exhibition his family trust has funded, but whose business also has designs on what remains of the coalfield, where it wants to open a new “green” pit in the face of local opposition. “My character goes to the core of the… trouble ,” he says, darkly. “He’s a man out of his time, a very wealthy man, and of course he’s based on someone real.” Who? He has been given strict instructions not to tell me, but I think I can work it out – and so might you, if you saw Tom Barrow’s excellent documentary series, Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain , on Channel 4 earlier this year. Lindsay’s character, Franklin Warner, surely has shades of the late David Hart , a highly controversial adviser to Margaret Thatcher who raised money for the “dissident” miners in an effort to break the strike (and there is, after all, a precedent for this: a character based on Hart also appears in David Peace’s 2004 novel, GB84 ) .

Lindsay is doing his best to keep shtum. “James said he wanted me to play the character he had written,” is all he’ll say on the record. But then again, he has the stories himself. “My dad remembered a man in a pinstripe suit at meetings [in the period of the miners’ strike]. He used to say, ‘Some posh bloke’s come up from London, and we don’t know who they are; I’m sure it’s the police or MI5 or something.’” His father often spoke at miners’ meetings, though he wasn’t a miner himself (he was a carpenter). “I used to go and watch him speak as a kid. He was terrific. I was so proud of him. When he died, there were so many young apprentices [at the funeral].”

By 1984, of course, Lindsay had left home. But he was still very much in touch with what was going on. “I knew an awful lot about it all. Not just my dad. My uncle was foreman at Shipley Colliery, just outside Nottingham. When the shit hit the fan [when the strike started], I was in London doing [the musical] Me and My Girl with Emma Thompson. I love Emma, and we got really involved together, so much so that we asked the producer of the show if we could give a matinee purely for the miners; he agreed to let 50 of them in for free.” As the months wore on, Lindsay would go back home to Ilkeston “and there were terrible confrontations between fathers and sons in our local pub… and it’s still painful. There are certain pubs, even now, outside Nottingham and Derby, where you do not say the word scab. Those tensions have had a huge effect on the social fabric, and that’s what James writes about so brilliantly in this series.”

Has he watched himself in Sherwood yet? “Same as you: two episodes. I’m just blown away by it. James is a genius. The plotting. You can only compare it to a jigsaw puzzle. And the cast!” Together, we run through them: “Lorraine Ashbourne: incredible . Monica Dolan: fucking terrifying . Lesley Manville…” He struggles for an adjective. “Oh, Lesley, Lesley… The scene with her and David Morrissey.” All credit to the BBC, he says. “They’ve given James carte blanche to go wherever he likes.” No one makes political dramas like this any more, not even Channel 4, and he’s just “thrilled” to be in it.

* * *

Lindsay was born in Ilkeston in 1949, and for a long time he was an only child; his mother, who worked as a cleaner, struggled to have more children, and his two siblings only came along much later. He attended – he has told this story before – a tough school, where the uniform “was a leather jacket and a bicycle chain”; not exactly the kind of place where people were into Shakespeare or even John Osborne . But a teacher called John Lally – “affectionately known as Pop” – began to organise something called the Grand Order of Thespians, and Lindsay took part, playing the Artful Dodger in a show called What the Dickens! “I got very self-confident, suddenly. John Lally said: ‘You’ve got the gift of the gab.’” It was Lally who encouraged him to apply to Clarendon College in Nottingham, which had a drama course, and it was Lally, too, who made him perform his audition piece - “ Once more unto the breach, dear friends” from Henry V – in front of the entire school. “I was up on the stage going through it, and the bell went, and John told all the boys to be quiet. I mean, 500 James Deans with their leather jackets, all of them desperate to go for a fag behind the bike sheds.” He launched into it, much as he does now, still word perfect: “ Or close up the wall with our English dead… Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’ One of my close mates happened to be called Harry Wall, and he went: yeah ! And then the whole school cheered and clapped, and I thought: ‘Yes, this is it. This is what it’s about.’”

From Clarendon, he was supposed to apply for a teacher-training course at Rose Bruford College in Bexley, south-east London. “But I lied.” Secretly, he had written to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (Rada). “I borrowed a fiver off one of my student friends, and I went down to London for my audition.” At the time, he had a summer job “in the sewers at a foundry, Stanton Ironworks. It was near a coal mine too, and our job was to clean the sewer up. When I got the letter from Rada, I was with my work mates. The letter told me what I would need two pairs of ballet tights, ballet pumps, certain items of makeup, a box to keep this makeup in. Our foreman said: ‘Bloody hell, have you considered a career in hairdressing?’” But they were really being kind, right? “Oh, yeah.” Later on, John Lally came to see him in a play at the Theatre Royal in Nottingham. “It was very touching to see him. He was my inspiration.”

What does he think about the fact that so many actors these days seem to have attended public schools? “Well, I had a full grant: £137 a term.” He thinks audiences are in thrall to poshness generally: “Look at Downton Abbey .” In his day, the feeling was that there were no (or at any rate, fewer) barriers for someone like him, and from the moment he graduated, he never stopped working: first in theatres in Exeter and Coventry, and then taking over from David Essex in Godspell ; a fruitful period of stage work that climaxed with Hamlet at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. “And after that, Me and My Girl , which transferred to Broadway.”

He loves live performance. But it’s British television with which many people – most people, I think – still associate him. He was a hit on the small screen early on. Between 1977 and 1980, he played Wolfie in Citizen Smith , John Sullivan’s sitcom about a beret-and-afghan-coat-wearing urban warrior who styles himself as the Che Guevara of Tooting – and it made him, well, too famous, or so he says now. “We were averaging audiences of about 20 million a week, and I couldn’t go anywhere.”

Wolfie was a comedy icon, and for a time, he was “everywhere”. On one occasion, at the invitation of Sting, Lindsay introduced the Police on stage in character, only to be rewarded with the deafening sound of “15,000 kids shouting ‘Power to the people!’ [Wolfie’s TV catchphrase]”. On another, a man on a scaffold in Manchester, having spotted Lindsay below, raised his arm and yelled the same words at him in greeting, only to lose his footing and roll down the roof of the building he was on (he was saved by an awning). But Lindsay finally walked away from the part – a decision that ended his friendship with Sullivan – after an incident in a Greek restaurant where some women “harassed me, making very, very sexy overtures, and the blokes there didn’t like it, and the next thing you know I was literally being manhandled… That wasn’t in my remit, being that famous.”

If fame is intoxicating – when he was in Me and My Girl on Broadway, people would stand up when he walked into a restaurant – it’s also complicated. “Dennis [Main] Wilson, the very famous producer who did Hancock’s Half Hour , once asked me: ‘Are you an actor or a performer?’ I wasn’t sure at the time what the difference was, but after that, I went to the Royal Exchange , and there I stayed for four years.” One after-effect of Wolfie was, perhaps, that for a long time Lindsay was afraid to be himself: he was terrified when he appeared on Michael Parkinson’s chat show, which may be one reason why he ended up performing a kind of 30-second Singin’ in the Rain (it was never broadcast, but it brought Ricky Gervais, who was on the same programme, to cast him in Extras as an actor with a capital A).

But as he also points out, time teaches you that fame is relative. In 1983, Lindsay starred as Edmund in a Granada TV version of King Lear . “Larry Olivier, who was very poorly at the time, was Lear.” he says. “And there we were in makeup. At Granada, there was this huge makeup trailer. At one end there was Larry in his crown, and sitting down the other end was Doris Speed, who played Annie Walker in Coronation Street .” At a certain moment, Olivier rose from his seat – in Lindsay’s memory, it was a throne – and made his way slowly down to Speed. The trailer was silent. Everyone was agog. “He stood behind her, and he leaned into her mirror,” says Lindsay. “And then he said [cue a pitch-perfect impression of Olivier]: ‘My darling, on behalf of the theatrical profession, I’d like to congratulate you on a performance that has given such heart to the nation. It’s real, it’s humorous, and we love you so much. Congratulations, my darling, and thank you.’ Olivier then made his way back to his own seat, at which point Doris Speed looked up at her makeup artist and said: ‘Who’s that?’”

When he talks to drama students, he is careful to tell them that a career as an actor is not only a ladder, there to be clambered up; there are snakes on the board too. And he thinks the rise of AI will only make life more precarious. Filming the 2019 fantasy Maleficent: Mistress of Evil with Angelina Jolie, he spent three days on a pedestal being photographed; if he fell ill during the production, AI would do the rest. (His agent was not pleased.) He’s happy to admit that he has grown more, not less, leftwing as he has got older - and perhaps the precariousness of the acting life, observed in the lives of others if not in his own case, has encouraged this.

“My son [Lindsay has two sons with his wife, Rosemarie Ford, the actor best known for her presenting role on The Generation Game , and a daughter with his former partner Diana Weston] teases me: ‘You’re this middle-class guy living in a £3m house in Gerrards Cross – shut up!’ And he’s right, of course. But I do care. I mean, Jeremy Corbyn was very badly treated…” Lindsay can be fiery, even irascible, when it comes to politics. He had a terrible bust-up with his brother, another carpenter who still lives in Ilkeston, over Brexit (“he had read some propaganda books”), and he’s trying to be more careful with X (formerly Twitter) these days. “I’ve realised that I just can’t get involved with some issues. I had a run in with Tracy-Ann Oberman [who is Jewish] on Twitter over Corbyn and his support for the Palestinians. I think with some subjects, it’s easier to kind of step away.”

And will he go on working, whatever he says about his age? (His phone has just rung, the ring transmitted unnervingly direct to his new hearing aid, about which he has uncertain feelings.) Of course he will. Thirteen years ago, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer (his was eventually removed); life is for living, and work generates its own energy. I tell him that the Barbican’s wondrous 2021 production of the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes , in which he starred alongside Sutton Foster and Gary Wilmot, was the first thing I saw when theatres reopened after the pandemic - and that it made me cry with happiness. He didn’t look tired then! He grins. “I did [John Osborne’s] The Entertainer for a year, and after three months, I was drained. But musicals… there’s something about hearing that overture in your dressing room, the sound of all those tap shoes going down the stairs.” As I watch him leave – “Give us a kiss!” he all but shouts before he goes – I half expect him to dance his way down the hotel’s thickly carpeted stairs.

• Series two of Sherwood starts on BBC One on Sunday 25 August