Brassed Off, York Theatre Royal, February 14 to March 1

WHEN he was cast in the upcoming York Theatre Royal revival of Brassed Off, John McArdle decided to do his research.

As bandleader Danny, he has to conduct a colliery brass band fighting its way to the finals of a national competition at the Royal Albert Hall in London – and conducting is something of which he has no experience.

This is the role that Pete Postlethwaite played in the 1996 film by York writer-director Mark Herman, whose story has since been turned into a stage play by Paul Allen.

Former Brookside actor McArdle went off to a brass band concert in Lancashire, where he spoke to the conductor.

“He said that all conductors have different styles. He said no matter what you do, it can be right although he also warned that you’ll get people going, ‘You’re not doing it properly’,” he says.

His own musical abilities extend to playing blues harmonica and he has appeared in a few musicals. “I can get away with singing. You have to be quite versatile as an actor,” he says.

First staged by artistic director Damian Cruden at York Theatre Royal in 2004, Brassed Off is being re-mounted by Cruden and the Theatre Royal in conjunction with the touring Consortium Theatre Company and Bolton Octagon, with McArdle being the first name to be confirmed for the tour.

The new production coincides with the 30th anniversary of the miners’ strike of 1984. The story is set in 1992 as the threat of Grimley Colliery closure leaves the future of its brass band uncertain. Bandleader Danny has hopes of winning the national championships but the arrival of flugelhorn-playing Gloria causes ructions among the musicians.

“It’s funny and has a lot of pathos,” says McArdle. “I’m not going back to the film because looking at other people’s performances doesn’t help. You want to make it your own.

“I don’t know how it will go down in the south. They speak a different language when it comes to miners. In the north I think it will be very well supported, especially the heartfelt speech Danny makes in the Albert Hall. At the start, he’s only interested in his band going to the finals. He’s not interested in strikes and all that, but at the end he realises how the closure will affect everybody.”

The miners’ strike was very much to the fore when McArdle was playing the soap role for which he is best remembered: Billy Corkhill, who arrived in Brookside Close with wife Doreen and children Rod and Tracy in 1985.

He agrees that Billy went through a terrible time. He lost his job, had mounting debts, turned to crime and suffered from depression. In one of Brookside’s famous scenes, he ended up repeatedly driving around the Close in his car churning up the neighbours’ gardens.

“He just wanted to keep his family together,” says the actor, by way of accounting for Billy’s criminal behaviour.

Later Billy married one of Brookside’s most famous characters, Sheila Grant (played by Sue Johnston, who, by coincidence, was in the film of Brassed Off). McArdle looks back on his time in Brookside as good years, when the Liverpool soap attracted audiences of eight million, unheard of for Channel 4.

“That programme produced a lot of good people, not just actors but directors and writers like Jimmy McGovern. It was a great hub of creation and had a great young following. A lot of students used to watch,” he says.

“It was ground-breaking in the issues it tackled. But there was humour with characters like Sinbad and Harry Cross. And it was great to work on – it was like a family.”

He knew it was precarious for an actor to leave a well-paid job, but nevertheless quit after five years of playing Billy. His first post-Brookside job took him to Australia to film a mini-series and he has since played opposite “some fantastic leading ladies”, with Helen Mirren, Juliet Stevenson and Julie Walters among them.

He also has portrayed a number of policemen, working his way up the ranks from copper on the beat in his early days to commander in The Bill via superintendent as a regular on Mersey Beat.

On several occasions he has been mistaken for a real policeman.

“Once I got pulled up by a copper when I was doing theatre in Bolton,” he says. “I was going over the speed limit, which I shouldn’t have been doing. He came and sat in my car and said, ‘you were doing 85’ – or whatever it was – ‘you should have known better as a policeman’. He didn’t book me, he gave me a caution.”

McArdle always tries to do one theatre job a year, although he left it eight years once because he was busy doing TV, but he found that was too long a gap “because you get a bit rusty and television is a totally different medium”.

He is not a great fan of touring, although took the opportunity to visit the Far East with a tour of Jim Cartwright’s play The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice.

“I’ve always turned down tours in the past, apart from the exotic ones. I’ve dreaded them, but this one for Brassed Off I’m going to do. Normally, I don’t like being away for so long or doing the same play for so long, but this is one I wanted to do.”

• Brassed Off plays York Theatre Royal, February 14 to March 1, then goes out on tour. York Box Office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk