Middlesbrough's Mark Benton and Lesley Sharp were keen to take on the double challenge of playing real life plane-spotting couple Paul and Lesley Coppin, who are famous for ending up in a Greek prison. Steve Pratt reports.

SOMETIMES it seems as though the same few hard-working actors are going from TV series to TV series. If you drew up a list of the top ten, Lesley Sharp and Mark Benton would be among them. Her credits include Daylight Robbery, Common As Muck, Nature Boy, Playing The Field and Frank Stubbs. His take in Booze Cruise, Murphy's Law, Eureka Street, Catterick, Early Doors and Quite Ugly One Morning to name but a few.

It seems the pair never stop working. They've even appeared together in three dramas - Clocking Off, Bob And Rose and The Second Coming. Now they're together again, as they used to say in old movie trailers, to go Planespotting.

Middlesbrough-born Benton stars as enthusiast Paul Coppin who, along with wife Lesley (that's Sharp) and other planespotters, are arrested in Greece for spying and imprisoned. The two-hour film is based on the real life incident several years ago, about which neither of the actors knew that much.

"I was aware in terms of what was on the news and fantasising if they were really spies," says Benton.

Sharp took a cynical view. "It wasn't a story I followed in great detail but, as it flashed through the news pages, you thought, 'there can't be any smoke without fire'."

Neither understoods why people want to go and take down aircraft serial numbers. Benton reckons it's "an extreme version of stamp collecting", saying: "It's like all those thing where it's collecting numbers and getting sets. What surprised me was the social side. They have a great time when they're in these places."

Sharp knows that some take the mickey out of planespotters and their ilk, seeing them as slightly odd. "It's that peculiar British sense of humour that quite enjoys people obsessing about things that appear inconsequential, but have deep meaning for those involved," she says. "It's about a very British pre-occupations, eccentricities that don't translate so well abroad. Other countries have their peccadilloes but we, as British people, know these strange hobbies."

The real life planespotters Paul and Lesley Coppin were both involved in the production and Sharp was "slightly nervous" about meeting the person she was playing on screen, she confesses. "If you're playing a real character as opposed to a complete fantasy, you have to make up your mind whether you're going to copy how they speak or veer from that and make your own analysis of the character.

"You still have a responsibility to the people you're portraying because they're still living and have real lives. It's quite nerve-racking. You can't let your imagination completely take over, you have to adhere to the truth."

Benton had the additional problem of Paul appearing in the first scene they shot. "I didn't know he was going to do it until just before," he says. "Luckily, I'd met him before, I'd been up to spend the day with him. It didn't throw me as such, but it's quite nerve-racking because you're doing it for the first time. You're nervous anyway when you kick off, but when he was there I had to keep saying, 'look it's not an impersonation of you, okay?'."

The scenes set in Greece were filmed in Portugal because, as Sharp puts it, "I don't think the Greeks were very keen to do a re-run". The prison scenes were shot in a hangar in Hertfordshire. Paul was jailed with the other men in the planespotting party, while Lesley was kept on her own in a women's prison.

"Lesley was totally isolated from other people who spoke English. I think she handled it amazingly and found resources she didn't know she had. She came out and fought for her good name and that of the people around her," she says.

"Potentially, they could have lost their lives. I would have been freaked out by that. She was amazing in that set of circumstances. When it happened, 9/11 was not long gone and the world was in a very paranoid state. That probably didn't help the situation. I wouldn't have liked it if it had just been played for laughs and ended up taking the piss. I am proud of the piece because it stands up as something that's amusing but very dramatic."

Appearing again with Benton was a bonus as she says there's definitely a shorthand to how they work now. "In the past we've got on so well and have a shared sense of humour which helps the moments when you're hanging around on set with nothing to do," she says.

Both have more TV projects lined up, but nothing together. She's working on a six-part drama for ITV called After Life, about a medium (that's her) and a psychologist (Andrew Lincoln), a pair of fragile damaged victims whose lives collide.

She's also waiting for C4 to show a drama-documentary, made with Oscar-nominee Sophie Okenedo and Lennie James, about an IVF mix-up involving a black embroyo implanted in a white woman.

Benton is working on two more Booze Cruise comedies with Martin Clunes and preparing to turn Christmas Lights, the one-off comedy-drama about warring brothers he did with Robson Green, into a series called Northern Lights.

* Planespotting is on ITV1 on Sunday at 9pm.

Published: 17/02/2005