Sex on TV? It's overrated . . .

They are funny, the tricks that the subconscious plays. I have been considering the career of the actor Trevor Eve, these days known as Peter Boyd in BBC Televisions police procedural Waking the Dead, but for me, thanks to selective viewing over the decades, one of the stars of the golden age of television sex. I arrive at the Soho offices of his production company fully intending to concentrate on his forthcoming BBC three-parter The Family Man, in which he plays an over-ambitious fertility expert. But my mind must be on other things. He enters the building at the same moment that I do and we share the lift up. Its a tight squeeze, he warns me as we get in. Just right, I hear myself saying aloud, for a steamy sex scene.

Eve, to his credit, blanks what must appear like a bizarre chat-up line, and we spend the next hour in civilised and, on his part at least, intelligent conversation. On screen he plays varieties of smooth: in person he is rather modest and uncertain. I like him at once. He is dressed in a T-shirt, pinstripe jacket and jeans. Because he is filming a sixth series of Waking the Dead, he sports Boyds customary stubble, which, like his floppy hair, now comes in chrome. He is 54 and has filled out since his early days on television as the emaciated Eddie Shoestring, the private eye oddly employed by a Bristol local radio station. But the Sunday Mirror was being cheeky when it captioned him tubby actor Trevor Eve next to a picture of him splashing about in the Caribbean. His tummy would surely snap back were a nude scene required of it  which these days it doesnt seem to be.

I was thinking about that the other day, he says. There used to be a lot of sex on TV. I was in a lot of sex on TV. I remember every time thinking, Here we go. Someone did a show reel for me once, an edit of all the sex scenes that Id done. And there were loads: A Sense of Guilt; a thing I did with Charlotte Rampling, Murder in Mind  that was full of them; The Politicians Wife. It was kind of endless. But he never objects? No, I dont really. I just dont think sex scenes further things too much. And there isnt as much now, is there? I think people have realised that sex on screen is a hugely limiting event, particularly on TV where you cant show anything not just revealing physically but revealing emotionally. Youre pretty limited. Youre into TV Dramaland.

Is that where his sex scenes were, lost in TV Dramaland? I think in The Politicians Wife we tried to push the boundaries. But you do get locked into that post-coital cigarette, the man on his elbow talking to the woman lying on her back. Maybe, then, the problem with sex on television is that it is not explicit enough. In any case, sex reproductive rather than sex recreational is the issue in The Family Man, a typically overwrought, on-the-nose, headline-driven drama by Tony Marchant. In Patrick Stowes fertility clinic everything that can go wrong does go wrong  triplets are born prematurely; an egg donor has an extra-vitro affair with the dad-to-be; Stowe gets busted for practising sexselection, yet increasingly thinks that he can play God.

Although, as Eve stresses, Marchant is careful not to write him off as a mad scientist, Stowes obsession costs him his family.

I researched with two IV clinicians, one in Harley Street and one part-NHS, part-private doctor up in Manchester, and went to all the procedures and meetings and tried to understand this obsessive world that theyre in. One of them works seven days a week, on 24-hour call. Every morning he starts with egg collection at 7am, does it all himself in the belief that if he follows everything through he will maintain the highest success rate in the country. There is that element of absolute obsession, which obviously has a repercussion on your private life. I remember talking to one of the men about how he had a son who loved football  he had season tickets but never went because he worked every weekend.

The Family Man is the sort of upscale drama that Eve does in the two months a year that he is not making Waking the Dead. The crime series in which Eve, Sue Johnston et al warm up cold cases began awkwardly, with the writers not sure how to handle the ensemble. But it hit its stride to become a ratings banker and was then knocked sideways two summers ago when its executive producer, Alexei de Keyser, died in his sleep at the ludicrous age of 36.

It was a big shock. Alexei really understood the show. Its been a bit tricky since hes gone. It still shocks me completely that one day I was talking to him on the phone, then the next day I get a call and hes not with you.

Eve has been around long enough to observe the unwritten rules of television change. In 1979, when he made his name in Shoestring, no serious actor wanted to commit himself to a long-running TV series. Eve, who by then had been directed on stage by Franco Zeffirelli and mentored by Laurence Olivier, quit after two seasons. Soon enough he won an Olivier Award for Children of a Lesser God. But television, as Peter Cook once said of football, is a jealous mistress and, despite Shoestrings huge success, the BBC did not employ him again until A Sense of Guilt in 1990. Similarly, although The Politicians Wife in 1995 was Channel 4s highest rated drama, he has yet to reappear on it. In the meantime, two attempts at a career in Los Angeles, from 1984 to 1989 and then 1991 to 1992, came to not very much. By the mid-Nineties, he realised, it was precisely those actors who were in recurring series who were being cast in the prestigious one-offs.

At around the same time, he began an alternative life as an independent producer. He set up Projector Productions after he fell from his horse in a polo accident and broke his back in three places. For a while he feared that he might never walk again. His main feeling was not of self-pity but anger, fury that he had ever moved to the Hampshire countryside, bought horses or taken up polo. Fortunately, after a course of hydrotherapy, his recovery was complete. The Eves nevertheless took the precaution of moving to London.

But back to sex. In Andrea Newmans A Sense of Guilt in 1990, Eve played Felix Cramer, a married writer having an affair with his best friends teenage daughter, Sally, played by Rudi Davies. The series was deliciously salacious and left the nation salivating for more. Cashing in on the success, a year later Eve and Davies starred as Leontes and Hermione in The Winters Tale at the Old Vic. These days he sees Davies outside the gates of the school that their sons attend. She gave up acting 15 years ago. I think she just decided it wasnt for her; she didnt enjoy any part of it.

As the Irish nationalist leader brought down by his affair with an English MPs wife in 1991s Parnell and the English Woman, Eve unusually played the victim of a sexual liaison. Paula Milnes A Politicians Wife, made contemporaneously with David Mellors fall, was less charitable. It was a feminist, new Labourite fantasy about a Tory MP s wife who takes elaborate revenge on her philandering husband.

By my reckoning, Eves last outing as a sexual miscreant was in Andrea Newmans Evil Streak in 1999, although the voyeuristic English professor he played was a Pandarus rather than a Romeo and kept his clothes on. Impotent, I suggest. Possibly. Cant remember. Or did I masturbate over something? I think I did, yes.

Why has he played so many cads? Why? Well, I think some actors have a problem with playing bad. They dont like to be unsympathetic. I dont mind that. I like playing the complexities of people and, I suppose, if you dont play bad as evil then you are on to a winner. The Family Man is, given the above charge sheet, a teasing title for an Eve drama, but it seems to reflect the actors private life. He married the actress Sharon Maughan in 1979 after they met playing in Zeffirellis Filumena Marturano. She was in the Gold Blend commercials with Anthony Head and is currently Tricia in Holby City. They have three children: Alice, 23, a stunning actress who turned heads in The Rotters Club last year and is now making Hollywood movies; Jack, 20, who is modelling in his gap year; and George, 11. The family tries always to share an evening meal together. It is, he concedes, not easy to run a marriage when both halves are busy actors. But it would have been a lot harder if wed been out of work.

Unlike the unreconstructed men he so often plays, Eve turns out to have been a prototype new man, present at all three of his childrens births and playing the midwife at Jacks. We were in Los Angeles and we werent fully insured, so we were trying to save money. We tried to do as much ourselves as we could because everything was itemised, from an aspirin upwards. I remember that we wanted to get in and out for under five grand, obviously dependent on the health of the baby. We had a very nice obstetrician and hed pop by the door of the delivery room saying Hows it all going? and Id say, Ive got the shoulders! We did get out for five grand.

He sounds like a credit to his fiery Welsh mother, who died five years ago. There was certainly no question in her eyes that a woman should be dismissed as a sexual item. She was a very forceful character. You had to show every respect and quite right. She was passionate. If you can stereotype nations, then the Welsh feel. They get involved. They get hugely down and they get hugely passionate. They have moments of great sadness but you cant beat a Welsh party.

Does he feel that he is on a rollercoaster of emotions? You try to use your emotion for the benefit of yourself rather than them. To quote Leontes, you dont want to be a feather for every wind that blows  which I think is a great line and oh, so true. But he feels the gusts? Yes, but I think the expression of emotions and compassion and warmth are what we are as humans. I think it s wonderful and I think the denial of those is wrong. If you went to school in the Fifties, to a boarding school, you werent allowed to express them and I never understood that. From the age of 6 onwards, I always thought that was weird.

Eves father, a Birmingham publican who was 50 when Trevor was born, sent him to board in Bromsgrove when he was 8. He was miserable. His letters home were censored and he was beaten. For anything, anything, from not polishing your shoes to running in the corridor. It was rife, a nightly activity, not always for me but for somebody, at 10 oclock. What happened was that from 8 to 13 you were beaten by the teachers and from 13 to 18 you were beaten by 18-year-old boys, prefects. I developed a really healthy hatred of authority there, Im afraid, and got expelled when I was 16. For spending the night with a kitchen girl, I read.

Well, that has an unfair and derogatory connotation, kitchen girl. She was a perfectly nice girl who happened to work in the kitchen. And he lost his virginity to her? Yes. And that was a terrible thing to have done? Oh, without question. It was heterosexual sex. Whereas, had it been a homosexual liaison? That would have been acceptable, particularly if youd been buggered by one of the teachers, I would imagine.

It is an unexpected burst of anger, yet one that throws into relief the smug, unfeeling roles that he takes. I have missed the point about his expensively tailored philanderers. The seductive, ambitious, manipulative public schoolboys that he portrays so often are control freaks. They are libidinous but they compartmentalise their libidos and keep their subconscious buried. Eve, although he could not be more different, obviously knows the type well.