Robert Bathurst: ‘It was the first time a day’s filming was stopped by armed robbers’

Born in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1957, where his father was working as a management consultant, Robert Bathurst moved to Ballybrack near Dublin when he was two. He went to Headfort, an Irish boarding school, and later Worth School in Sussex. He then studied law at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he became part of the student comedy sketch troupe Footlights.

He made his television debut in the never-broadcast pilot episode of Blackadder. His big break came in 1997 with Cold Feet, and he’s since starred in New Tricks, Wild at Heart and Doctor Who. He has four children with his artist wife Victoria Threlfall and lives in Sussex.

Best childhood memory

Going to see a pantomime at The Gaiety Theatre in Dublin. I’ll never forget the excitement of seeing the pit orchestra and the very, very, very bright lights for the first time. I also remember a comedian called Maureen Potter and this one particular gag she did. The Irish prime minister at the time was called Charles Haughey and I remember Maureen Potter saying that the prime minister was so vain that he made his donkey say Haw-Hee instead of Hee-Haw, which I rather enjoyed and it set the pattern for my low artistic taste.

Best day of your life

I know this is a bit cheesy and probably a bit personal, but it would have to be getting engaged. Until that point, I was not one who was naturally drawn to commitment and the whole thing rather took me by surprise; how liberated I felt having got engaged. I was very unromantic in my delivery of the proposal: I was going to propose during the starter of this lunch in Covent Garden, but it was clams and anchovy sauce which was so good I didn’t actually propose until later in the lunch. And the rest is history.

Best Cambridge moment

There were so many, but the highlight was my first term doing the panto Snow White. All of the dwarves were on their knees with these big shoes coming out from them – apart from me, who was standing. It was written by Jimmy Mulville and Rory McGrath and directed by Nick Hytner, who went on to be the National Theatre’s artistic director and was also playing the Dame. I was playing a dwarf called Shorty and I was the only one standing as I’d been in prison for a long stretch. That was the level of humour we were dealing with and frankly it didn’t get much more highbrow.

Best on-stage triumph

A two-hour monologue on cannibalism in a pub in Chelsea in the 1980s. I was untrained as an actor so it proved to me that I could act and I remember thinking: “If I can handle this, then I can probably handle anything.” It proved that I hadn’t bitten off more than I could chew and set the tone for choosing projects that would be easy to turn down and might seem unlikely choices. I’ve always tried to pursue that idea that if something seems unlikely, and perhaps is easily avoided, to go at it and give it a go.

Best Cold Feet moment

The pleasure of Cold Feet was the sort of unfurling of the first five years. It was usually two episodes into every series when it seemed to be that the series was working. Each series was the last but then it got recommissioned, so each year had a special tension. Realising that it seemed to be catching on in public consciousness each year was incredibly exciting. The best singular moment was doing an episode in Sydney. There are certain times in one’s career where it’s just golden, and that was one. You have to hang on to the golden moments as they’re happening, rather than just in retrospect.

Best personal characteristic

Honestly, that is so difficult. I’m floundering on this one. I think scepticism probably. Scepticism and no presumption. I just think that’s a good driver for any artist. I’ve worked with people who have no self-doubt and, okay, self-doubt is to some extent dishonest because you’re just worried about hubris, but nonetheless I think that the presumption that things won’t work is a driver to try harder.

Best decision

I was asked to be a TV presenter in my early 20s. I did a whole series of auditions and was offered the position. At that stage, I knew I wanted to do what I was doing at the moment and knew that if I took it, it would change the perception of everything I did for the rest of my career. So I turned it down.

The job in question was to be a co-presenter on That’s Life!, which used to reach 18 million viewers a week and Esther Rantzen was brilliant in it. But I knew that if I took it, throughout my life I would have been in these sorts of interviews and I’d have been marked down as one of “Esther’s boys”. I don’t want to crow about this because any job you turn down, it always looks a bit smug because someone else decided to do it. But on the other hand, I’m glad I didn’t do it.

Worst boarding school memory

You don’t allow yourself to admit it when you’re there because you have to just constantly fight to survive. But the sensory things about boarding school are unforgettable. When you go back for your first night of the term and it’s the freezing starched sheets which seem so unfamiliar and alien to the warm soft ones from your home life, but also the revoltingly stinky reek of Jeyes Fluid because the school will have had a deep clean. And soon that smell becomes subsumed by the smell of old socks.

Worst moment of your life

I’ve been very lucky, in many ways, but I guess the loss of friends and terror of illness in people you love. And also a lot of self-employment, which involves weekly disappointment and constant despair. But that’s what you subscribe to when you take on the life of an actor and, apart from that, I’ve been very lucky.

Worst moment on stage

I forgot my lines in Chekhov’s Three Sisters. About three months into the run, my mind just suddenly went blank. I looked around and none of the other people on the stage knew what my line was so I called for a prompt and, unfortunately, the stage manager who called the prompt was from Leipzig and I couldn’t understand a word he said, so I had to call it again. So that was a tricky one. It’s horrible when you forget your lines because your temples start pumping and then the following night you have to get to that point where you forgot your line again, so it’s a horrible amount of uncomfortable tension.

Worst stage role

At the beginning of my career I played a soldier in chainmail and tights and a balaclava, holding a spear in Frances de la Tour’s Saint Joan at The National. I had one line in it, and I thought, “What am I doing?” But it taught me a lot. It taught me about the wider profession, because I’d come out of university and I didn’t really understand what the profession involved so it was both valuable and dispiriting but not entirely dispiriting, as it just fired my ambition not to continue like that.

Worst moment in front of a camera

It was a unique set of circumstances. I was doing an ITV thing called Wild at Heart and we were filming on a game farm in South Africa. All sorts of helicopters started flying over and it turned out that a neighbouring game farm had been raided by people and the police were after them. Then we were told that they had stolen some cars, and were heading towards us, so it was the first – and as yet only – time a day’s filming was stopped by armed robbers.

Worst personal trait

I sometimes find that I can’t recognise faces, which is a real problem for me. I know that face blindness is a condition but for me it’s particular faces that I don’t recognise. Over the last 40 years or so I’ve had a particular failure of recognising the faces of casting directors, which professionally is terrible.

I’ve met casting people very briefly before I go into a meeting, then see them two weeks later and because of this problem when they’ve said “hello”, I look over my shoulder and wonder who they’re talking to, which is not good business. If only people knew that I had this problem recognising faces they might be a bit more understanding.

Worst advice

The worst advice I’ve ever given to anybody I was working with was somebody who was having her first child. The advice was: “Treat your first child as though it’s your fourth.” I think that’s perfectly legitimate but, in retrospect, completely impossible to carry out.

Worst decision

In the spirit of scepticism, I think the worst decision I’ve ever made is the one I’ll be making tomorrow.

Robert Bathurst will star in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell at The Coach & Horses pub in Greek Street, Soho from 29 October to 21 November. For tickets visit jeffreyplay.com