ALL ABOUT EVE

Trevor Eve has just been to the dentist. 'Would you like a half-eaten turkey burger?' asks his wife, Sharon Maughan. 'The kids couldn't get through it.' her swollen spouse manages a smile. 'Not just now, thanks.' Instead the actress famws for her impact in a TV coffee commercial brings him a soothing cup of tea. The west London house is warm and seems to be full of children, though in fact there's only 7-year- old Alice and 4-year-old Jack, The Eves also have a place in Los Angeles, which explains the recent absense of Trevor Eve from the small screen over here. Now, as Felix, the novelist with writer's block, he's back and wreaking havoc for seven weeks solid in A Sense of Guilt. Havoc is confirmed, in the first instance, to a small interwoven circle of Felix's old friend, social worker Richard, Richard's artist wife Helen and Helen's nubile daughter Sally (Rudi Davies). From there it spreads like a forest fire to Richard's yearning ex-wife Inge, Helen's ex-husband Carey and his pregnant second wife Marsha. 'I just hope,' Trevor Eve says, 'that people like it. Seven weeks is a long time to be hated. If you do a play that no one likes, the butcher's forgotten about it the next day - but seven weeks .... Ahmmm!' This is Trevor Eve's first series for BBCtv 'apart from Shoestring, but there Eddie was the central character, with different people coming in every week. A Sense of Guilt was a much more enclosed business with a small bunch of us closeted together for five months' The character of Felix was a complete change of direction for Trevor Eve, too. 'I'd always played caring sorts of people with good intentions - and you couldn't exactly call Felix caring.' Does he create havoc so that he'll have something to write about, or is it just a knock-on effect? 'I played him as uncalculating, but I must say when I saw him on the screen, I wondered ... 'Mind you, I think writer Andrea Newman has had an unfair press image for being sensational and I consider A Sense of Guilt anything but. No one gets away with anything - not even Felix. 'I must admit I got a bit depressed by it all - every day you went in to rehearsal there was some new emotional tragedy in the plot. The characters smoked and I hate smoking. Sharon said I changed in a very subtle way - i became unbearable. Ha! Luckily we all got on.' Trevor Eve has never been a man to pull his punches (there was an actual incident when he 'pushed' a journalist) and it was this very independence that put paid to Shoestring ten years ago after only 21 episodes. he felt the West Country sleuth didn't necessarily have to stumble over a corplse or get embroiled in a whodunit every single week of his life, but was interesting enough to merit storylines of his own. The BBC saw it differently and Bergerac, the one-time boozing Jersey detective, roared in, in his 1949 Triumph roadster, to fill the gap. Trevor Eve - a late starter who went to RADA after studying architecture for two years - shrugged Eddie off and took to the stage. 'I've calculated that in all, I've spent four years on stage in John, Paul, George and Ringo, Children of a Lesser God, High Society, and recently in a Pirandello farce Man, Beast and Virtue. 'I take my hat off to theatre audiences,' he says wonderingly, They get in their cars and plough through the traffic and I sit in my make-up wondering why they don't want to be at home as I do ...' is that because he's essentially a normal sort of person? 'Ha! Ask Sharon! I'm not renowned for my normality at home.' 'He's always absolutely lovely,' she insists. next week Trevor Eve takes on yet another radical change of character when he starts filming in the titel role of Parnell for the BBC, co-starring with Francesca Annis. Then it's back to Los Angeles, where he is planning to star in a comedy series for ABC TV. He can almost claim to be an LA native, having recently sat - through an earth tremor. 'I didn't dp any of the things one is supposed to do. On the other hand, a friend of mine stood in the door frame, as per the rule book, and a bookcase fell on him. There might be a lesson there for us all ...'

By Eithne Power for the Radio Times, January 1990