HEAT OF THE SUN

After a career of playing controversial roles, in a new ITV series Trevor Eve finally gets to play the good guy... which is, it appears, just what he is in real life

Now for a change from slimeballs (BBC1's A Sense of Guilt, in which he impregnated his best friend's daughter), adulterers (Channel 4's The Politician's Wife) and manic-depressive alcoholics (in Uncle Vanya on stage). In Trevor Eve's new incarnation, the clean-cut actor, yet another in the long list of alleged sex symbols to the nation's ladies of a certain age; plays a good cop, Superintendent Albert Tyburn, formerly of the Yard, transferred to Kenya in the 1930s to set up a criminal investigation unit which brings him into conflict with fogey-ish colonial mentality. "I don't really think of it as playing a policeman, more as someone who was basically good in the world," he says. "It's refreshing not to be destroying a rival, or covering up something. I find it much more fun to read a script saying, 'Tyburn saves boy from burning building' rather than 'Tyburn faces wife after being dsicovered with mistress'. I wanted to do action adventuer. It's nice to get on a motorbike, ride a horse, and dive into rivers. More positive. 'Uplifting' is the word." He smiles and remains silent for a while, as he does often. Our meeting takes place in the surreal, dim-lit and self-consciously "interior designed" setting of suite 409 of Blake's Hotel, South Kensington (at a special rate to the film company of 350 pounds; normally it costs 475 pounds), a brisk stroll from the house he bough recently having fled the country idyll he and his wife, actress Sharon Maughan, embarked upon when they returned from nine intermittent years living in Los Angeles. He is charming, but wary to the bring of narcolepsy. "I've got Welsh blood, I'm pretty cagey," he explains.
With some justification he feels intrusion into private lives of actors is unacceptable - if not boring - particularly after untrue rumours that he had a relationship with Francesca Annis when they starred in Parnell and the Englishwoman in 1991. He is so determined to be anodyne and uncontroversial that I feel, perversely, and without any evidence, there must be something to hide.
Perhaps, I suggest in an idle moment, he was expelled from his minor, single-sex public school, Bromsgrove, in Worcestershire, for sexual activity. he looks stunned. "Where on earth did you dig that up?" there's another long pause, during which I don't tell him I am guessing. "Yes, I was in a little bit of trouble at 16, to do with a girl. I was expelled for a week during which they negotiated with my parents."
His father, a drinks wholesaler, was 50 when Trevor was born, married to a woman 15 years younger, and I read they scrimped to pay for his education, although he denies they suffered any hardship. "I can only describe my father as the most frugal man I have ever known. He wasn't remotely extravagant and didn't indulge himself with any luxuries - no holidays, never eating out - so maybe that was his form of saving. You have to remember he was born in 1900, a whole different era.
"The school (considerably changed since those days) was able very rapidly to convince my parents I was a complete monster who needed slapping into shape. they took me back on conditions - that I had no character references and wouldn't graduate to high positions of authority like my contemporaries as prefectts or captains of sport - and later industry. One master told me I would never attain any responsibility. Friends who went through the process with me claim it did them good, so clearly it suits some and not others.
"Thrashing against a system for ten years is a tough way to introduce yourself to adulthood, and I wasn't a huge fan of the school, although I've been asked to be master of ceremonies at their 300-year celebrations, which is funny and ironic. I'll probably go as a kind of exorcism, although I don't have any resentment. Those days have dwindled into the past and are dissipated. I hope this isn't all about my schooldays."
The biggest upset was that he lost his chance to become captain of cricket. "I'd been in the first XI for five years, since I was 13, and was certain to be captain. I never contemplated taking up the game professionally because I don't think I was good enough to play for England, If you are, there isn't a choice. People make sure you do. My most satisfying time during four months filming Heat of The Sun in Zimbabwe was a cricket scene when Paul Strang (a world-class spinner, playing for Notts this year) bowled against me. I don't play any longer but it's nice to look back and think, 'You wre probably a bit better than you thought.'"
His real ambition was to be an artist but his father disapproved. "He was an extremely practical man and said I'd make no money, so suggested I pursue design in three dimensions and become an architect. That's what I did, but I was disillusioned very quickly. I thought it would be a wonderful opportunity to build my fantasies all over the world, and then found myself doing cross-sections of toilets and sewage pipes in Birmingham. I have no patience...I want an airport, and I want it now! Basically, I realised I wasn't a potentially competent architect."
After three years he dropped out and thought of becoming a ski instructor in Austria, until he saw the 'impossibly difficult" test. "Friends knew I wasn't keen on architecture and suggested I did something that interested me, which was fairly logical. I went to the cinema and theatre a lot and it consumed my spare time, but I never imagined I'd become an actor. I'm not one of those who was always tap-dancing as a child and going, 'Mum, I've got to sing.' I thought I might become a director because it seemed a more academic approach to the entertainment business. The leap to acting was extreme."
He looked in the Yellow Pages one day under D for drama, and applied to Rada. At the audition he was told he had five minutes. It was the first time he had ever acted, yet he was accepted immediately. "It was a flippant way to find a drama school, but the consideration to go there wasn't, nor the determination. I'd done English A-level, so I recited some Richard III. I knew within the first week it was an environment I wanted, although I couldn't have done a job more alien to my family. They were shocked, but they stuck in there and were s supportive as they could be." After Rada he joined Liverpool rep for his first professional part as Paul McCartney in John, Paul, George, Ringo ... and Bert, by Willy Russell, which led to Filumena in London's West End in 1977, and his first meeting with his wife Sharon who was also in the cast.
The director, Franco Zeffirelli, had an interesting auditioning technique. He told Trevor, "Turn round darling," whereupon the designer, a large lady called Raymonda Gaetani, grabbed his testicles. He didn't move. Zeffirelli, impressed, shouted, 'Bravo!' and hired him. "It was part of Franco's delight, to shock and see how you react," he recalls, wincing even now. Although he assumed he'd have to spend several years in the theatre "working myself in" he was soon cast as the dissolute private eye, Eddie Shoestring, on BBC1 in 1979 which initiated his career as a "sex symbol". "Oh God! Talk to my family about that. They'd just laugh." But Laurence Olivier was a fan, and cast him as the lead in Hindle Wakes, part of a series Oliver was directing. "He was an immense support and guide, and helped me get a green card when I went to America in Shadowchasers, which was a forerunner of The X-Files.
"It didn't last beyond a season, but I made a lot of money and stayed in America for a while. Both my sons (Jack and George) were born there." Maybe he would like the enormous wealth generated by a long-running American series? He pauses, yet again, for a long time. "You can become quite disposable there. Put it this way: I don't have any regrets, whatever that means."

I try, a little desperately, to squeeze an opinion from him about the self-delusion of actors who convince themselves a mediocre but lucrative series is high art. "I know those who are living it up and earning a lot in crappy series," he says. "It's conviction money. 'Ah', they say as they count it, 'I see why this is so brilliant.' I'm not very good at working in stuff I have no respect for. That doesn't make me any better or worse."
He and Sharon lived in Los Angeles between 1984 and 1989, and again for two years in the early nineties. "The classic thing is that when I was there I became a huge admirer of all English work, so I'd travel back to act at the National theatre." They finally returned three years ago when their daughter, Alice, was 12, and bought a farm on the Sussex/Hampshire border because it was near the school - Bedales - they chose for her.
Rural existence soon palled, however. "Sharon realised it was wrong from the beginning. If you've lived in a city all your life, you come up against a different set of people and values, The country is wonderful inmany respects - we had horses and the children were free to run around and swim but not with me or Sharon. We'd be away. Now we're in London I'm home in 20 minutes, see more if them and feel closer. Also I lost touch. Do you know there isn't a proper cinema between Guildford and Portsmouth? zthey've all been closed down. It's desperate."
His last big television series was Channel 4's The Politician's Wife, as Juliet Stevenson's husband, an apposite drama about the hypocrisy of adulterous politicians playing the "family values" card. "Our intention was to show the deficiencies in the Tory party at the time. The reflective powers of drama are huge - theatre was conceived in ancient times as a place to 'come and see what you're aal doing'. I'm fascinated by politics, and there is no more compelling drama than conflict in high places, but I wouldn't like to have been a politician, except for one reason - if I was able to sort out the traffic problems in London. Whatever party you're in, you have to become part of the Establishment, and I wouldn't sit very comfortably in that. Anyway, as an actor you get to speak in the House of Commons and bat against a Test cricketer."
Actors also face being "labelled". Sharon has played many serious roles but is doomed to be best known for her Gold Blend coffee ad, and he is still remembered a Eddie Shoestring, 20 years later. "People put hooks on you and if that helps you remain in some state of recognition it's all right. What should I do? Lie in bed at night and shout (he screams, modestly) 'I wish the audience thought I could play nice people'? i don't think so. So long as it's complimentary that's OK, and they were obviously convinced by me being horrid. I hope they'll enjoy it as much now I'm Mr. Nice Guy." OK, Mr. Nice Guy, what is the secret of a successful marriage?
Imagine the pause. "As soon as you talk about relationships, the cliches pour out, and hen you read them in black and whiteit sounds so simplistic. Let's put it down to good fortune." I try one last stab. He was brilliant as Bill Maitland in John Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence, a three-hour monologue by a man undergoing a mid-life crisis, and although he looks as if his biggest crisis is deciding what shirt to wear, I wonder if, at 46, he has experienced similar problems?
"I don't know that crises come at a particular time. There are crossroads and confusion at any age. You mean buying a red sports car syndrome? I've heard of that. Going off with young girls? Is that a mid-life crisis? Could be. Or it could be just having a lot of fun. If you're not hurting anyone I wouldn't see that as a crisis."
And that's as controversial as it gets.