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Angels - Dr. Edward Clarke

- regular cast member for a year

This was my first TV job other than bit-parts. Stephen Butcher, who had directed me in 'People for Dinner' in London, and who was a regular director for the BBC, cast me as a regular character in the tenth (and what turned out to be the last) series of 'Angels', the BBC's long-running soap about student nurses.

I played Dr. Edward Clarke, a young obstetrician who came to work at the fictional Saint Angela's Hospital. It was a great year of steady employment (even though I was paid as a recurring rather than a regular character), the rest of the cast (which included Pauline Quirk and Tony Armatrading) were lovely, and, if I was honest, I enjoyed the recognition that comes from being on TV twice a week on a regular basis (although it wasn't until Eastenders the following year that 'soap stars' really achieved their current 'celebrity' status). Everyone should have at least one year of being recognised in supermarkets!

I have to be brutally honest with myself, though, and say that I don't think I ever did myself or the part justice. My inexperience in front of the cameras, coupled with the pressure of high volume TV filming meant that I never did really settle into the character. This situation was not helped by the part itself. The original conception for the character was quite brave for the era and the time-slot that Angels went out in - one of the nurses, Alison Streeter (played by the truly wonderful Juliet Waley) had apparently been raped by an unknown assailant in the final episodes of the previous season. (As a side note, I remember having seen those episodes when they were transmitted and being so moved by the power of Juliet's performance that I actually cried, so I was knocked out by the prospect of working with her.)

The planned storyline for the first few episodes was that it would gradually be revealed through the two characters reactions to each other that my character, Edward Clarke, was the unknown assailant. More than this, over the course of the series, it would come out that what had happened in the last season, unforgivable though it was, was the result of inexperience and fear and weakness on Clarke's part and that the true relationship between the two, while complex and difficult and dreadfully blighted by the assault, could eventually turn into love.

This was difficult and very morally ambiguous territory - still is - and was venturing into the kinds of story-lines, perhaps, that we have become more used to in our contemporary soaps with their flawed characters and exploration of life's many complexities. But the early eighties was a different time. Storylines were simple then, more black and white, and Angels did go out in the early evening. I don't know what, if anything, was being discussed behind the scenes, but even in the first episodes the storyline felt as if it was being diluted and the previous season's events being 're-written' to downplay the full ramifications of what had happened. We ended up, I think, with something neither one thing nor the other - not brave enough to explore the full complexity of the storyline but still with enough darkness to make it difficult to play as a standard love story. For this reason it always felt slightly queasy, as if we were slightly afraid of the full implications of the story we were almost telling.

In retrospect, I take my share of the responsibility for this - perhaps if I'd been more experienced or more assured I could have pushed for changes. I'm also enough of a realist to say that it might well have been deficiencies in my own performance that drove the storyline this way rather than any backing off on the part of the producers. I honestly don't know. But, whatever the cause, the story never really caught fire in the way it might have done. And I really regret that, particularly as Juliet could have blown the audience away with the right material to work with. Even with the watered-down storyline we had she was astonishing, able to totally inhabit the moment, and she moved me to tears on more than one occasion. A very remarkable actress indeed.

As the storylines for the nurses moved away from Obstetrics to other parts of the hospital I was seen less and less, mainly turning up once a week in the canteen to talk about lettuce or whatever. Even our marriage was overshadowed by that of two of the other characters, not being shown on screen at all, and by the time the series ended after a year I was little more than a supporting role.

I do regret that I couldn't make the character stronger and that I didn't have the chance to develop more as a TV actor in that time. But it was fun, and I made some great friends (Tony Armatrading is still one of my best mates even though he now lives in L.A. and we haven't seen each other in several years).

As for the fame - well, I learned a valuable lesson there. Two weeks after the last episode of Angels aired, I was once again completely and utterly anonymous!