It's a Dunn deal

ANDREW Dunn just knew he wanted to be an actor. It was one of those things, instinct or whatever. Except that it wasn't one of those things if you grew up on Tyneside in the 1970s.

He appeared in plays at school in North Shields and enjoyed the experience. So that was it, an actor he would be.

The careers officer at school took one look and suggested teaching or mining, both of which paid good money at the time.

"I knew what I didn't want to be," says Andrew, 48, who was born in Leeds, grew up in the North East and lives in York. "I didn't want to work in the shipyards or the mines and this was the 1970s when there were still shipyards and mines."

In the end, he half-listened to that careers officer, opting to study as a drama teacher at Bretton Hall College, near Wakefield. This worked out fine, except that he liked the drama part and not the teaching part.

The playwright John Godber was a fellow student, two years ahead of Andrew. When Godber started running Hull Truck Theatre, Andrew was lured over after a year or so, spending much of the 1980s with the company, either at the Hull base or touring in shows such as Bouncers or Up'N'Under.

He has the build for such Godber vehicles, being fairly tall and, well, robust. He enjoyed the work too but the touring wore him down until, in his early 30s, he'd had enough.

His wife, Andrina Carroll, is in the business too and for a while they lived in grotty corners of London.

When Andrina landed a season at a theatre in Staffordshire in 1992, she noticed the price of houses. So they scrambled out of London and got their feet on the housing ladder, moving to York a few years later.

Andrina tends to work in the theatre, often at York Theatre Royal, although she appears on television too. By chance, they are both in the opening episode of 55 Degrees North, which returns to BBC1 tomorrow night, shifted from its original Tuesday slot.

As in the first series, Andrew is second or third lead, playing Sergeant Rick Astel, his biggest TV role to date after Dinnerladies, the Victoria Wood comedy. He did well on the back of Dinnerladies, although he earns no money from the repeats which loop round and round on UKTV Gold, having signed away his soul on the original contract.

55 Degrees North is a cop drama set in Newcastle and featuring Don Gilet as a young black officer transferred from London, much to the resentment of the locals.

The series received rotten reviews, then good ones, and the viewing figures blossomed. So a second series was commissioned, and a third is possible, if the figures are good again.

The BBC has taken a gamble on this, putting 55 Degrees North on at 8pm, up against Heartbeat on ITV1.

The earlier time slot forced changes to the script. "You can't have swearing and things like that," says Andrew, or too much violence. A scene showing a robbery in a building society had to be re-written. After the watershed, a knife could be held against a throat; before 9pm, such violence has to be suggested.

Andrew's character, who craves promotion but it still stuck in uniform, is given more comedy turns.

"In my big story there is a thing called Cop Idol which I enter. It's a singing competition and I sing Bonnie Tyler's, Total Eclipse Of The Heart," says Andrew.

Can he sing?

"I can hold a tune," he says, laughing. He laughs a fair bit, but can be serious too, and seems down to earth for an actor, solid and not flighty. Some of the best laughs came his way courtesy of Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's onetime press spokesman.

Andrew played Campbell in the Rory Bremner show. He took on the role at a time when no one quite knew what Campbell did, aside from possibly running the country through Tony Blair.

After Andrew had been on television for a couple of series, the Daily Mirror political journalist Paul Routledge thought it would be a laugh to invite him to the House of Commons, where Campbell was addressing political editors from the national papers.

The journalists were all there, "drinking of course", as Andrew recalls. Whatever their political persuasion, they all said they liked his performance. It made them laugh and felt like a small revenge against a man grown too powerful.

Then he got in a lift with Rouledge, Trevor Kavanagh from the Sun and Alastair Campbell. It was a small lift so the press spokesman couldn't fail to notice his tormentor.

"It was when Alastair Campbell had started running marathons. He's very tall, much taller than me," says Andrew, jumping to his feet to illustrate the difference. "And very fit and slim too, a lot lighter than me. He scowled at me and called me a fat bastard and started taking the mick out of my suit."

It's a precarious business, being an actor. Sometimes the work comes, sometimes it dries up, so it can be hard having two actors in the family. Andrew shudders but says that's what it's like and, besides, most people are just trying to keep afloat.

They have a son, Elliot, who is nine. Last autumn, Elliot joined his parents on stage for the acclaimed York Theatre Royal production of Brassed Off. He enjoyed the experience, up to a point, but was put out to find out he had to go back and do it again and again.

Andrew loved being in Brassed Off - the political subject matter, the drama, the brass band, he relished the lot. But the still prefers television these days.

"Having said that, when you do a show like Brassed Off and it's sold out night after night, it's great - but not all theatre is like that."

Andrew should know. He's been in touring productions when the actors played to nine people - John Godber's On The Piste, if he recalls correctly.

So it's television for Andrew Dunn. But a programme such as 55 Degrees North brings its problems. "When you work on something like that, there are two worries, your hair and your weight."

A TV drama isn't filmed in the order in which it is shown, so hair can be a continuity nightmare, too short, too long or too wrong. And the weight?

"There's always lots of free food so it's terrible if you're greedy like me."

l 55 Degrees North, BBC1, Sunday, 8pm

Updated: 15:51 Friday, May 20, 2005