CHARLES HUTCHINSON meets a great northern character actor.

ROY Barraclough's portrait in the Guinness Television Encyclopedia casts him as a "Northern character actor and comedian". Mention his name, and whether you think of his partnership with Les Dawson as gossiping Cissie and Ada or his long innings as scheming Alec Gilroy in Coronation Street, it brings a smile to the face.

Barraclough has no complaints at that definition. "If it is a pigeonhole, then it's one I'm proud of," says the Preston-born actor. "I never had the shape for juvenile leads so I've always had to play character parts."

Yet the northern comedy character tag is too narrow. Barraclough, for example, has played Willy Loman, the little man with the big weight of the American Dream on his shoulders in Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman.

Next week, he escapes the pigeonhole once more, this time playing the strict Rafe Crompton, ruling his respectable working-class family with a rod of iron in Bill Naughton's 1962 comedy Spring And Port Wine at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds. "It's a bit of challenge, this one" says Roy, taking a drag on his ever-present cigarette.

"People normally associate me with comedy roles, but I'm playing the stern patriarch here, and everyone else gets the funny lines - and yes, I do feel jealous, particularly as we're well into rehearsal and if there's a good line, I do wish I had it!"

Recalling how he had learnt later that the Nottingham Playhouse board had initially greeted his casting as Willy Loman in 1984 with the comment "Oh God, he's a soap actor", Roy acknowledges his latest role may raise eyebrows once more. "Hopefully, people will be surprised again. It's a risk playing Rafe but I've reached an age now - I'm 65 - when I want to do things that present a challenge. It either has to be a challenge or fun."

There had been rather more of a risk involved in giving up his 12-year career as an engineering draughtsman to pursue his acting ambitions without formal training at the age of 27. That decision meant his weekly pay would drop from £26 to £12 when Huddersfield New Theatre - one of only four theatres to reply to his 250 letters - invited him to join the repertory company in 1962.

"My family were shocked, totally shocked," recalls Roy, whose father was a monumental mason with his own business. "My parents thought I'd gone bananas and were on the point of taking me to a psychiatrist. But then my mother was quite supportive, saying 'if you want to do it, do it now, but you'll be back in a month', while my father consoled himself by saying 'well, you've always got a proper job to fall back on'."

There was to be no turning back for Roy Barraclough, who had so enjoyed watching pantomimes and variety shows as a child, seeing Norman Evans, Rob Wilton and the rest, and then saving up his pocket money to watch pre-West End shows preview at Blackpool's Grand Theatre.

Why was he so drawn to the theatre? "I suppose initially as a child it was just showing off! But then it was the chance to play different characters. That always intrigued me," he says.

If "pure luck" had played its part in his landing his repertory contract - the artistic director of Huddersfield New Theatre had seen him in an amateur production in Preston - then it was to do so again in bringing about his celebrated partnership with bulldog-faced comedian Les Dawson.

"I was doing Yorkshire Television's first soap opera, Castle Haven, playing Harry Everitt, a noisy neighbour in a block of flats in Whitby, and Les had arrived at YTV to do his first Sez Les show, just after winning Opportunity Knocks.

"Anyway, this actor from London fled the building and got on the first train back home because he couldn't cope with Les's ad-libs. So they were stuck for an actor to do two sketches: they were practically stopping cleaners to ask them to do them, but then some kind soul suggested me. So Les and I met in the bar and we hit it off immediately."

The Cissie and Ada partnership came two series later. "We were both fans of Norman Evans, and when we were hanging around in the studio waiting for the crew to hang the lights, we used to go into this gossiping women routine, like Evans," says Roy. The producer suggested they should do it as a sketch, in drag; Roy and Les did not think TV audiences would accept this, but they did agree to try it out as a warm-up routine, and it went down so well that Cissie and Ada's elevation to television became inevitable. "But at the time I don't think either of us realised it would become the classic routine it did, one that people remember with such affection."

The same applies, of course, to Alec Gilroy, the irascible rogue in Coronation Street who Roy last played on December 10, 1998 - he has instant recall of the date - some 26 years after his debut in the Granada soap. Would he make another return to the Rovers? "I think the public would like me to... I don't think the producers would," he says.

"The series has changed so much that the kind of comedy I did is now a bit of an anachronism. They don't seem to want that comedy now; they want serious story lines."

Roy regards Alec with affection but candour too. "I feel he mellowed down too much. He lost that acerbic wit he had, but that was down to the writing. It tends to happen with all the heavier or sharper characters in soaps. They start smart and mellow down." So, no Gilroy comeback, then? "They did leave it open but no, I think he's gone now. I wouldn't want to go back into that race now. They're doing so many shows a week now it's worse than weekly rep for actors. It's just point the camera and shoot. At least with weekly rep you used to be able to rehearse."

That sounded more like Alec than Roy.

PICTURE: Roy Barraclough in Spring And Port Wine