Karl Howman has never escaped his fame as Jacko in TV’s Brushstrokes. He talks to Steve Pratt about touring in Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap

TOURING in a play for a long time means the actors get to visit an awful lot of places. Sometimes, says Karl Howman, it gets confusing about whether you’ve been there before, “I’ve seen a lot of places I thought I’d been to and I actually hadn’t,” says the actor still remembered as Jacko in BBC sitcom Brush Strokes.

“You don’t realise until you get there. When I see the theatre I think, ‘No I haven’t been here’.”

When the 60th anniversary tour of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap arrives at Sunderland Empire next week, Howman can be certain that he’s been there before. He helped director Ed Wilson with auditions for the National Youth Theatre there one year and has wanted to actually play at the venue ever since.

He joined the NYT at 15, after acting at school, although he wasn’t following a dream of being an actor. “I didn’t decide to be an actor – it took me over. You start getting paid for what you enjoy and in those days it wasn’t a conscious decision ‘this is what I want to do’. When you’re offered work and get paid for it, you do it,” he says.

He’s been in The Mousetrap tour for more than a year, with time off during summer and Christmas breaks. He’s playing mysterious foreigner Mr Paravicini in the production, which has already been seen in Newcastle, Darlington and York with dates to come in Billingham and Harrogate.

Of course he was aware of the play. “You have to have lived in a cave if you don’t know about The Mousetrap,” he says. “When I was working in London, doing voiceovers, I used to walk past the theatre all the time. It was a fixture in my life.”

He hasn’t been on stage for ten years, having been busy working – writing and directing – with his film company. Then he was invited to be part of the 60th anniversary tour and he said yes.

“It’s something I’ve never done and coincided with my 60th birthday. Only afterwards did I discover that my mother, while she was pregnant with me in 1953, went to see the play,” he says.

The cast only offers a choice of two roles for a man of his age and he was drawn towards Mr Paravicini.

“The attraction is that he’s quite a colourful character and I quite liked the idea of playing someone as colourful as that. He’s the odd one out and he’s a foreigner and turns up mysteriously,” he explains.

The touring production is played in period without any attempt to modernise it. “You can’t update it – you have a mobile telephone and everything is found out in the first five minutes “The attraction is its time and place. It’s a very select time because it was just after the war and an important time for many people as they started to feel better about themselves,” he says.

“It’s very symbolic of the times and there’s an enormous amount of nostalgia around it but Christie is a brand. People get what they expect, a whodunit.

“I’m a fan of Agatha Christie. I loved the books.

The first thriller I read as a young adult was The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd.”

BEING on the road for so long with a different town and different theatre every week, he’s settled into a routine. “You take each day as it comes. It’s like anybody going to work.

I toured when I was younger quite a few times.

Now, I mostly get the chance to go back home at weekends.”

He’s been doing a variety of things over the past decade, notably working for a good part of that time on his film Fathers Of Girls, which starred Ray Winstone. “I had an idea I wanted to make a film and saw it go from the idea to a Leicester Square cinema. The writing, directing and producing with my business partner took four or five years. It was tiring, but I wanted to do it. We went to festivals and were lucky enough to get a distributor,” he says.

He finishes in The Mousetrap tour just before Christmas and has enjoyed being back on stage.

“I love it, it’s my first love and where I started. It’s a buzz you can’t get out of your system. You can get it on a sitcom because of a live audience, so that was fun. You get an instant response.”

Which brings us to Brush Strokes, the show for which he’s most famous if you don’t count those TV commercials for Flash. How does he look back on that sitcom? “I don’t go round thinking about it,” he replies.

“It was a very happy time, but I had many more happy times. It was a job. It only took six or seven weeks a year and you are known as Jacko 24/7.”

He still gets fans coming to the stage door with Brush Strokes set boxes for him to sign. Well, it’s better than along a packet of Flash…

THE MOUSETRAP TOUR

Sunderland Empire, Tuesday to Saturday, Oct 19. Box Office 0844- 8713022 and atgtickets.com/sunderland

Billingham Forum, March 10-15. Box Office 01642-55266 and forumtheatrebillingham.co.uk

Harrogate Theatre, June 16-21. Box Office 01423-502116 and harrogatetheatre.co.uk