Hello Joe

FILMING Alan Plater’s Newcastleset TV film Joe Maddison’s War really did feel like coming home for Melanie Hill. “It’s been great coming back because I’m from Sunderland and it’s been nice coming up here again,” she says on location in a village hall in Northumberland.

She misses the North-East having settled in London. “I miss my childhood really. I remember being happy and feeling good,” she says.

“Home is London now and I’m happy there and the kids are London born and bred. It’s a shame really because they don’t feel the North-East is there home, while I do.

“When I go to a match at Sunderland, I go to see the football and then go down my gran’s street in Sunderland. My kids think I’m mad.”

Joe Maddison’s War, which she describes as “a good oldfashioned drama”, stars Kevin Whately as a shipyard worker and his pal Joe, both of whom have seen active service in World War One, signing up for the Home Guard on Tyneside in 1940 Hill plays Selina Rutherford.

“She’s lost her husband but has a lot of spirit and gets introduced to Kevin’s character by Robson’s character and they start a relationship. I guess they’re both lonely and become friends, and it all goes on from there really.”

It’s the last piece written by Jarrow-born Alan Plater, who died earlier this year. He never came to the set but Hill met him at the read-through. “It’s a great loss,” she says.

She’d been trying to work out the last time she worked in the North-East, deciding it was probably with Green on the series Close And True. There was also Jimmy Nail’s Crocodile Shoes and Spender, as well as Finlay, partly shot in Glasgow.

She was a gangster in that tough thriller. Before that in Auf Wiedersehen Pet, she played Timothy Spall’s wife Hazel. So she worked with Whately on that and on an episode of Lewis.

“It’s nice if you know people when you go on projects,” she adds.

Surprisingly she was one of the few North-East actors not to get a part in one of the Catherine Cookson TV adaptations. “They all passed me by,” she says. “It was probably because I went down to Rada when I was 19 and you leave that pool of local actors.”

She began acting in the sixth form at school and “once I got the bit between the teeth I decided that’s what I wanted to do”.

WHEN the principal of Rada asked what her plans were if she wasn’t accepted in the drama school, she said she’d read English and drama at university. “But he said if you want to act you shouldn’t do that,” she recalls.

“Afterwards, I was lucky enough to get straight into rep.

It’s a shame actors don’t get a chance to do that now. You learn your craft, it’s an extension of drama school.”

When we spoke on the set her youngest daughter, Molly, had just applied for drama school.

Hill has two daughters – Lorna is the other – from her marriage to actor Sean Bean.

“Her decision came out of the blue. Me and her dad were a bit horrified but you’ve got to back them up,” she says.

When we speak again, she tells me Molly hasn’t got into drama school. “She’s going to reapply next year. Once you have that desire, you can’t say I will walk away. You have to get used to rejection.” The cast of Joe Maddison’s War were able to step back in time by shooting on the streets and in the shops at Beamish open air museum. “I researched the Forties through books and the internet,” says Hill.

“I’m a bit daft about my grand and granddad, I’ve been back to where they lived and sat in the garden. I just try – and this is going to make me sound funny – to think about them and channel them when they were young.

“Then it’s just your imagination and bringing those people alive through that hardship. They were very resilient.”

The film has meant brushing up her Geordie accent. “I was married to someone from Sheffield and now I’m with someone else from Sheffield so people tell me I’m more Yorkshire which is bloody annoying,” she says.

She’s been in Manchester of late filming a new series for BBC2, Candy Cabs, about the lives and loves of a group of women launching an all-female cab company. The cast also include EastEnders actress Jo Joyner, Paul Nicholls, Denis Lawson, Jodie Prenger, Claire Sweeney and Ricky Whittle.

“That was so much fun,”

reports Hill. “It’s a comedy and I’m a taxi driver. I love driving, although half the time the vehicle is being pulled on a low loader. I play a mother of four by different fathers. We’re women taxi drivers who only pick up women passengers.

“It’s a huge cast with a core of eight women. In that respect it’s like Playing The Field which I was in. Now there’s talk about doing another 13 next year.”

■ Joe Maddison’s War: Sunday, ITV1, 9pm.