Holby City (BBC1 Tuesday 8pm); A Victorian Celebration is at Harrogate Theatre on January 31. For tickets, call 01423-502116.

IF you’d told Robert Powell when he joined BBC1’s hospital series Holby City that four years later he’d still be there, he wouldn’t have believed you. But he is still walking the hospital corridors – and loving every minute of it. “It’s extraordinary, it’s the first time in my life I’ve had a full-time job, so it’s really quite weird,” he says.

“I’ve never done a nine-to-five job, although with Holby it’s eight-to-seven.”

The reason he’s still there is simple. “I love it, I’m having a ball,” he explains.

“It’s a job I really enjoy doing. It sets lots of challenges. It’s a job the more you put into it, the more you take out of it.

“It had never come across my bows as an actor before – I’d never been asked to do it. The minimum stint is one year and I had never been asked to do that for anything.

“When this came up, initially I was not sure at all because I’d never done it.

But, on the grounds I had done just about everything else, being asked to create a character over a period of time was the challenge.

“I thought I would give it one year. At the time it seemed a bit long, but thought I would give it a try. Now I’m going into my fifth year.”

But he does get out occasionally, like the trip to Harrogate Theatre with his show, A Victorian Celebration, for one night only this month.

Holby is a full-time job as he’s under an exclusive 52-week contract with the BBC. “So they own me and obviously there’s no time to do theatre or anything like that,” he says.

He’s allowed to do shows like the one he’s bringing to Harrogate in which “the triumphs and tragedies, the humour and the pathos of Victorian life” are brought to life through the likes of Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Mrs Beeton, Elizabeth Barret Browning, Thomas Hardy, Edward Lear and others.

Powell appears with actress Rohan McCullough, Clive Conway (flute) and Christine Croshaw (piano).

There are a few productions in their repertoire, but with shows only being staged eight or nine times a year, there’s no chance to get fed up with them.

“I enjoy doing this kind of thing because I like to perform in front of an audience.

It gives me the chance to oil the cogs of live performance,” he says.

Croshaw comes up with a draft for the show and the performers shape it from that. Powell loves poetry, but says there’s humour as well in the show. “I make sure of that,” he adds.

“The Victorian parlour poetry is sensational because it’s so over the top. We do two pieces of Kipling, which I love. I think he’s terrific. We do some Gilbert and Sullivan but not singing, just spoken.

It’s huge fun.”

His Holby City commitments actually make it easier to do these one-off performances.

“The problem is that theatres like to go to press six months in advance and usually for me to say I will be in Harrogate in six months time on a Wednesday is absurd, because I could be anywhere,”

he says.

“But because I’m in Holby, I know two things – I won’t be working on a Saturday and I will be in the country.”

For him, the glorious thing about shows like A Victorian Celebration is that they’re happy to play small theatres in front of audiences of 200 or 300. That means he’s played places he’d never imagined, like Rochdale and Billericay.

Powell confesses he is very content at the moment. When he finishes Holby – and he has no idea when that will be – he wants go back to the theatre. “I’ve got various ideas that I would love to do and one of the great things about working for the Beeb is I make a lot of contacts.”

As for what he’d like to happen to his Holby character, Mark Williams, he points out it’s a long time since his wife died. “It would be nice to have a bit of a love interest, but I have said to keep it as a mature love interest,” he says.

In the meantime, he’s happy to keep to his Holby schedule. “I get up at six in the morning, then look at my watch when I’m driving the car out of the garage and it’s always 7.17. If it’s 7.18, I’m going to be late,” he says.

“I only live 25 minutes away from Elstree studios, so I’m in my dressing room by 7.45am.”