Doctor in the House (The Observer)

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Publication: The Observer
Date: 2005-03-20
Author: Liz Hoggard
Page: 8
Language: English

Christopher Eccleston is best known for flinty dramas such as Our Friends in the North. In an exclusive interview he reveals why he wants to be the new Dr Who.

FOR 20 YEARS, Christopher Eccleston has cornered the market in troubled masculinity, from Our Friends in the North to Michael Winterbottom's Jude (1996). Audiences sense he will never do anything false or flashy. They'll tune in for complex, issue-driven drama (Hillsborough, The Second Coming, Flesh and Blood) just because he's in it. In 2002, he played Hamlet as 'an apocalyptic stand-up comic' at the West Yorkshire. Playhouse and brought in a younger, edgier audience. Yet he lacked the one role that would make him a household name. 'People would say, "I love your work, you were in... um... um," "he says.

Last year, everything changed. Despite competition from Eddie Izzard and Bill Nighy, he was named as the ninth Time Lord in the much-anticipated revival of Doctor Who, written by Russell T Davies (Queer as Folk). Starting on Saturday, he is a key part of BBC1's strategy to combat ITV's Ant and Dec in the ratings battle and revive the concept of family viewing.

'I think there'll be a backlash,' Eccleston says cheerfully, 'because I was built up a bit. The Guardian said, "Shakespearean actor plays Dr Who" when I've done one Shakespeare play in my entire career. There was talk of "an actor of stature" and all that nonsense. It's going to be a rough ride because I don't look or sound like any of the previous Doctors. But I think people will get used to a bigeared Northerner running around.'

In fact, as a child, he never liked Dr Who. 'He seemed an authority figure; I felt a bit patronised by him. I loved Connery as Bond: he was part of the establishment, but maverick; he didn't sound like he was a teacher at public school.'

We meet at a hotel in the Bay area of Cardiff, where Eccleston has been filming Dr Who for eight months. He once observed: 'I haven't got traditional film actor's looks, thank God. I've got twin brothers, eight years older, with the same features, and if anybody taught me not to take myself seriously, it was them.' But, at 41, he's growing into those hooded eyes and demonic cheekbones. On screen, he can be intense, bloody-minded and very sexy.

HE DOESN'T RELISH interviews, but today he is bursting with energy, despite filming for 14 hours a day. I haven't been out, I haven't seen films. None of the crew have seen their wives or their husbands or been to the badminton. But I've loved shouldering the demands of the role.'

It is rumoured he has been paid £1 million for the 13-part series, but his real excitement is the writing. He's worked with Davies before, on The Second Coming. 'He's as close to a genius as I've seen in telly. Russell loves sci-fi - you can write about big, big issues - while always being aware of the humour of it. Dr Who will work as a romp, if that's what you want, but, if you look closely, he's having a go at Rupert Murdoch in episode eight, and at plastic surgery in episode two, and everything about the Daleks tells you about the duality of people.'

Eccleston is a good judge of scripts. Early in his career, he took a bold risk. Although he loved Jimmy McGovern's writing on Cracker, which used a traditional police drama to tackle racism, homophobia and misogyny, he got himself written out of the series when his character, DCI Bilborough, became a mere sidekick to Robbie Coltrane, negotiating a famous death scene.

He says it dates back to watching TV with his parents. 'I learned a lot about my dad and my mum just from watching TV with them. I saw them react to things like Basil in Fawlty Towers and Yosser in The Boys From the Blackstuff, or the Scorsese films. I have vivid memories of watching Spongers, a Jim Allen script about a woman who has her children taken away from her. It was absolutely shattering and part of that was seeing the effect it had on my dad. I noticed my mum could sit through anything harrowing, but my dad couldn't.'

He especially likes the fact that the new Dr Who will be crossover programme for adults and children: 'If you can create an appetite in them for intelligent, demanding TV aged eight, these are the viewers of the future. Russell jokingly said to me, "I can't have children,

so I want to create lots of me."

Eccleston's Northern accented Time Lord is resolutely contemporary. 'Bravery and intelligence have always been equated with received pronunciation and it needed to go.' I tease him about the scene in episode one where he gives a speech of Shakespearean magnitude in front of an alien resembling a giant souffle. 'Oh, I'm great with souffles,' he laughs. 'I reserve all my intensity for souffles.'

He describes himself as 'emotionally tied up with the central message of the programme, which is: seize life, it's brief, enjoy it. The Doctor is always saying, "Isn't it fantastic?", which is one of Russell's favourite words. "Look at that blue alien, isn't it fantastic? Oh, it's trying to kill me. Never mind, let's solve it."

But for Eccleston, the best thing is that Davies has feminised a male genre. And he's given them a proper heroine [Rose, played by Billie Piper]. The Doctor is quite sidelined in the first episode and it's like revenge for 40 years of domination. If you look at all of Russell's work, his particular strength and interest is women. He writes gay men brilliantly, but is not especially interested in heterosexual men. Everyone else is, so he doesn't bother.'

Piper's Rose is a go-getting teen in the mould of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Eccleston bills their relationship as 'an unconventional love affair'. Watching the show as an adult, you can't help wondering if a young woman really should be going off with a dodgy older man in a phonebox? Eccleston laughs: 'I haven't really thought about the problem areas of it, though one famous writer emailed me saying, "You've reinvented the dusty old paedophile!"

BORN INTO a working-class Salford family, Eccleston was a remedial reader at school: 'I think the only reason was that I wasn't inspired.'. A sympathetic teacher introduced him to Dr Seuss and more progressive American books, and by 11 he had a reading age of 19. Leaving school in 1979, he went on to Salford Tech, where he started acting. After a drama degree at Central, he spent much of the next seven years as a manual labourer with periods of 'profound rejection'. Finally, aged 29, he was cast as the learning-disabled teenager Derek Bentley (infamously hanged in 1953) in the 1993 film Let Him Have It.

After the film, he stayed in contact with Derek's sister, Iris, who successfully campaigned to get Bentley's conviction quashed before her death. And he's still close to Trevor Hicks, the campaigning father who lost two daughters in the 1989 tragedy at the Sheffield football stadium, having played him in McGovern's Hillsborough.

Let Him Have It launched a career in damaged males. 'I think I was seen as a grumpy old sod, because I played a lot of people who are troubled.' By his own admission, Eccleston worked very little in the late Nineties. He turned down a role in Saving Private Ryan and screwed up his audition for Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line. He lost out on the role of a Bond villain to Robert Carlyle and the lead in The House of Mirth to Eric Stolz. In 1999, to everyone's surprise, he threw in his lot with Hollywood and went to star in the Nicolas Cage movie, Gone in 60 Seconds, which resulted in another period of self-loathing. 'It's a terrible film and a terrible performance.'

He's always been keen to do more comedy. But despite cameos in The League of Gentlemen and 24 Hour Party People, casting directors persisted in seeing him as 'a class-avenging lout'. His performance in Dr Who, wry, quirky and surprisingly flirtatious, should put paid to all of that.

'Dr Who was a massive risk for me because I'm not known for my charm or comedy. To a certain extent, I've always been a niche actor, so I thought, "It's about time you put or shut up, Chris." You know, this role could bury me for a few years, but in a funny way I welcome that. If it buries me, there are things I'd like to do such as directing and producing. I'm not just a song-and-dance man. I'd like to find new writers and protect them. I'd like to get my hands dirty with some power. I envy people who can shape culture.'

The entire Dr Who crew has lived in a capsule for eight months. How did he celebrate re-entry into the real world? I went to see Kinsey, which is fantastic. I don't see how Liam Neeson's performance could have been ignored for an Oscar. Then I caught up on Outlaws and Help, the best things on TV. Paul Whitehouse is a working-class hero of mine.' And then a long rest? 'No, I want to work. It's going to be quite hard letting go. For the past eight months, I've been needed, I've been important to people. I want to do more theatre. There's an audition for A View From the Bridge, and also Platinov, possibly.'

ECCLESTON IS fiercely private. Promoting Hillsborough, he told a journalist: 'It's obscene. I'm talking to you about a man who lost his two daughters at a football match and you want to know if I have a girlfriend.' Last year, the papers had a field day when Piper's marriage broke up (Eccleston was wrongly assumed to be the cause). 'I didn't have time to have an affair,' he deadpans. 'Four minutes a day I'm filming. After sex, that would only leave me one minute!'

Is he ready for the tabloid frenzy? 'I think I presumed I'd be able to continue along my merry way, and that's what I intend to do. But obviously, in accepting the role, there was something in me that said I'm ready to embrace all that comes with it. I think there are ways you can manage intrusion. But I'm ready to be corrected on that.'

Days after we meet, his relationship with Welsh actress Siwan Morris, so good in Davies's ITV sitcom, Mine All Mine, is splashed all over the Sunday papers. The implication is that Eccleston -'Dr Phew' - is a red-blooded shagger. The News of the World has even found a topless picture of Morris and made it look like she's being embraced by a Dalek ('Fornicate, Fornicate'). You're torn between laughter and tears.

Hopefully, Eccleston is made of sterner stuff: "There was no way I was ready to do Hamlet,' he tells me. I'd not been on stage in 10 years and here I was playing the biggest classical role. It was gun-to-the-head time, but I didn't want to be this 70-year-old bloke, who went, "You know, I was offered Hamlet: turned it down." Same with Dr Who. I don't want to be saying, "You know, I was offered the 7pm slot on Saturday night opposite two Geordies..."

Dr Who starts on BBC1 on Saturday

ONE FAMOUS WRITER EMAILED ME SAYING, "YOU'VE REINVENTED THE DUSTY OLD PAEDOPHILE!"

Caption: 'I don't look or sound like any of the previous Doctors'; below, Eccleston with Billie Piper

Doctor in the House (The Observer)

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