Acting peculiar (From The Northern Echo)

Acting peculiar

5:43pm Thursday 2nd February 2012 in Features By Steve Pratt

Former Coronation Street actor Craig Gazey talks to Steve Pratt about leaving the popular soap and returning to the stage with a tour of Mike Stott’s award-winning comedy, Funny Peculiar.

YES, says Craig Gazey, making up his mind to leave Coronation Street after three successful years wasn’t easy. But then “it’s a difficult decision to give up any job that gives you a certain sense of security”, he points out, adding: “I didn’t really come into acting for security. I always like to play it dangerously and to find enjoyment in different jobs. That’s what always attracted me to do it.”

There’s little doubt that, had he stayed longer, he would have cemented his reputation as a soap icon. Graeme Proctor was one of those essentially lovable characters that viewers take to their hearts.

It wasn’t planned that way by someone who made his stage debut at the age of five in an amateur production of Cinderella in which he played Rambo, bodyguard to the Fairy Godmother. There were appearances in TV shows (inevitably The Bill was among them) and seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company and at London’s Globe Theatre and Royal Court Theatre before the brights lights of Manchester and Corrie beckoned.

Graeme made his first appearance as David Platt’s cellmate, before turning up on the Street where he developed from being the comedy relief to being at the centre of a domestic drama in which he married a foreign girl to enable her to stay in the country, much to the chagrin of his girlfriend, Tina.

The love triangle provided his exit from Weatherfield and back on to the stage, first at the Trafalgar Studios in London and now on tour – including a date at Darlington Civic Theatre – in a revival of Mike Stott’s comedy Funny Peculiar.

It’s claimed that when Gazey went into Corrie, he wrote in his diary that he wouldn’t stay more than three years. True or not, that’s what’s happened. Although, he says he’s been misquoted on the subject of wanting to return to the stage.

“It’s not a case of just wanting to do theatre, or that I never wanted to do television. That’s not the case,” he explains.

“Coronation Street is a continuing drama and, if you are in it, then you are only in that. I prefer to have eclectic mix of TV, film and theatre together. My ideal would be to do a bit of everything in a year.

“I enjoy the process of theatre much more, but when I went on to Coronation Street my biggest thing was I didn’t know if my skill set could quite travel to television. It was nice when it started to go quite well on Corrie and I learnt my trade there.”

Gazey didn’t have any particular plans after leaving apart from a desire to return to the theatre. “I wanted an immediate fix which I pretty much got from a play, Third Floor, at Trafalgar Studios and then there were discussions about Funny Peculiar.

“I’m also writing on my own and doing my own projects. I wanted to free some time up to make some things of my own, primarily for film and TV. When I did theatre before the Street, all my ideas were around theatre. When you spend more time doing film, then your thoughts go to that medium. I’m working on making a short film.”

The recent London stage work didn’t come as a shock after three years of TV work. “It’s a bit like riding a bike, you never forget. It’s getting back into it and finding that groove,” says Gazey.

“I had no real sense of fear but I’ve always felt very natural on stage.”

THAT panto appearance as a five-year-old – in a part written for him in a panto involving his stepmother at Rochdale Infirmary – was just the start. “It was not something I was pushed into. I was an eccentric child and my family were often pleased to use that energy or hyperactiveness,” says Gazey, who went to Bolton Theatre Workshop before training at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.

Funny Peculiar, Stott’s awardwinning play, was first staged in the Seventies with Richard Beckinsale and Julie Walters among the cast.

This touring production includes Suzanne Shaw, Gemma Bissix and fellow Street actress Vicky Entwistle, alias Janice Battersby. “We didn’t do an awful lot of work in the Street together, but did know each other quite well. It’s nice for us to do something together as you can be like passing ships in Corrie with 60 cast members,” he says.

Gazey plays small town grocer Trevor Tinsley who has a wife and new baby, but is led astray by the idea of free love. “I was given Funny Peculiar to look at by producer Bill Kenwright to see if I wanted to do it and I really liked it – it’s really good fun,” he says.

“My character is in every scene, and it’s quite gruelling. He’s a guy who lives in a sleepy village in the Pennines and is frustrated with his life. He can see on the television and radio that the Seventies is about free love and being a free spirit and decides he wants some of it.

“The character is very different from Graeme, but I suppose he does have certain elements of being eccentric in his ideas that people look at him as being a different species.”

Gazey can identify with him in a sense. “I’m from a place called Rayton, which is outside Oldham in Lancashire, and my frustration was being free to express myself and be an actor. In the North, everyone did the same things and wore the same things.

“It does have elements of how a lot of towns in Northern suburbia are still very set in their ways. It strikes a lot of relevance even now in a lot of places.”

The play is billed as unsuitable for children and his last play was adult-themed too. “I was very dismayed to see a young girl in the front row when I had to say some not nice things in the play,” he recalls.

“I came out of the stage door and I was walking to go and get some food when I bumped into her family.

I said I was really sorry about what I’d said in the play. They were like, ‘we loved it’. They said the girl had wanted to see Graeme. I was semi-naked in the play and was really quite embarrassed about it.”

Inevitably, he continues to be recognised by the public as Graeme, which he doesn’t mind although worries that they expect him to be playful and be their buddy. It’s one of the penalties of playing such a likeable character.

“I get a lot of people telling me to get back on the Street but generally it depends on where you are really.

I hadn’t been back home for a few months and when I went back, I felt the difference. It’s a bit more manic up North, but people are perfectly nice.”

His only previous touring experience is with the RSC in the US, but it was something he wanted to do.

“It’s nice not just to stay in London and make it a limited thing, but to try and retain a bit of a fanbase.

And Twitter helps.”

• Funny Peculiar: Darlington Civic Theatre, February 6-11. Box office: 01325-486555 or darlingtonarts.co.uk