Former dalek finds himself perfectly cast in school role

First published in Let's Talk! Suffolk, February 2006

He had 10 years in Minder, a starring part in The New Statesman, and has appeared in dozens of TV series. Now Michael Troughton has a new role - as a drama teacher at Woodbridge School .

ALL boys of a certain age used to play at being daleks. Michael Troughton actually was one.

While I and thousands like me trundled round school playgrounds with stiff arms outstretched, croaking the word "Exterminate", young Michael was in a BBC studio doing it for real.

It helped that his father was Patrick Troughton, the second and arguably the best Dr Who.

And while some children of famous parents find it hard, for Michael it was "fantastic" having a Time Lord for a dad.

"It was just a wonderful feeling," he says. "I was in my first year at secondary school in Harrow when Dad got Dr Who. There were a few problems of jealousy at school, but overall the other kids thought it was brilliant.

"If it had happened when I was in primary school, it could have been a problem I suppose, but it never was.

"I got to do all sorts of things. I was in one episode of Dr Who, driving a dalek."

Elder brother David did more, enjoying name parts in three separate Dr Who stories.

Mind you, it was not quite Happy Families in the Troughton household - at least not in any ordinary way.

Michael's parents had split up when he was young, and Patrick found himself father of two families, each with three children, separated by 12 miles of west London .

Michael recalls, "We'd see him half-and-half - we'd share.

"He was very good. At the beginning he was on the bus, between Mill Hill and Kew , because he was so skint. Then when he got Dr Who he'd turn up in gradually posher and posher cars. He certainly didn't desert the children - he was always very supportive of us."

The glamour of acting obviously rubbed off, too, as both David and Michael followed dad into the family business.

"I got caught in the flow of the river. When I was about 18 I'd taken A-levels and we didn't have enough money for me to go to university. My father was doing so well I couldn't get a grant, but with two families to support there wasn't much spare cash. I could have gone either way, into the arts or the sciences, but I just drifted into acting.

"When I left school I went straight into the arts theatre - the Unicorn Theatre in Great Newport Street . I didn't go to drama school like David, but we both started at the same theatre at the same time.

"It was a children's theatre, and boy do you learn quickly with an audience of children. They soon tell you if you're rubbish.

"Then I went on into rep and broke into television. My biggest early success was Testament of Youth in 1979, and that launched me into a better TV career. I stayed in television mostly. I ventured onto the stage occasionally, but my love was film.

"David was the opposite. He found filming very tedious and loved the ensemble feeling of a cast - and a regular job. He went to Stratford and basically stayed with the Royal Shakespeare Company for 18 years.

"I did the RSC for three years, but I really enjoyed the buzz of TV. It's a bit like a drug, that power you have when you appear in front of people, emotionally affecting an audience in whatever way.

"A lot of the stuff I did, sitcoms and so on, you'd not only have the cameras, you'd also have an audience of 300 people, so it was quite an art knowing who to play to. You'd have to play to both the camera and the audience. It's done like a sort of theatre show."

After Testament of Youth came 10 years of regular appearances in Minder as Detective Constable Melling. Meanwhile, in 1987, Yorkshire Television came up with The New Statesman, a barbed satire on Conservative Britain starring Rik Mayall as scheming MP Alan B'Stard - and Michael Troughton as his brainless sidekick, fellow MP Piers Fletcher-Dervish.

It was the part that Michael's face became best known for, and it led to problems of type-casting, yet he insists, "I don't regret The New Statesman at all - it was a wonderful time. Yorkshire TV were very brave - it was really close to the bone. It was a close-run thing at the beginning whether it was going to be taken off. There was nothing else like it - only Spitting Image, and that wasn't real people.

"Rik's character and mine developed from improvisation. Working with Rik you have to be a re-actor, not an actor. He's very sharing, but I had to be almost the straight man to him - but also a complete twat."

A wonderful time, then, but one that led ultimately to what Michael now calls a mid-life crisis.

"I'd got to the stage where I was making a good living acting. It wasn't a desperate struggle - as we all know, 95 per cent of all actors are out of work at any one time - but it got to the stage where I was repeating myself over and over again.

"After The New Statesman I was beginning to get very similar sorts of parts and I just got bored.

"I really didn't want to do theatre that much. I was offered various tours and things like that. I'd done them before and it's exhausting. I was a bit like my father in that respect - he called it 'all that shouting in the evening'.

"I enjoy watching theatre, I would enjoy doing a limited run, but a long run is a nightmare. All these actors who say 'It's different every night'. it's not.

"Right at the beginning of my career I thought I'd like to teach, but I hadn't gone to university. Towards the late 90s I thought, 'Why don't I do a university course?'

I thought, 'I'm not going to do English, I'm not going to do drama, I'll do something really different.

"I'd always been really interested in physics. So I looked at what they'd got on offer at the Open University and did a basic science degree, majoring in physics, astro-physics and geo-physics.

"I timed it so that as I passed my degree I went into the school that my children attended, Sir John Leman in Beccles, where I knew the headmaster quite well. I had a chat with him and said, 'How about me coming to teach?'

"At the time I didn't think it was brave, but when I look back I think it was very brave. Boy do you work hard when you train to be a teacher on the job, two years of really hard grind.

"Towards the end of my third year at Beccles I started to think I might go back to acting. I found myself being very successful in being able to teach quickly and retain the kids' interest, but I'd go home absolutely knackered.

"Then, out of the blue, I went on to the internet, punched in 'drama teacher' and two jobs came up - one in Rugby and this one at Woodbridge School . And I said, 'This has got to be Fate' - a £3.5million theatre being built to play with. I knew the school because we'd thought about sending my son here. It was an opportunity I couldn't miss."

But how did the former star of a biting anti-Tory satire feel about leaving the state school system to work in a private, fee-paying school?

He admits, "I felt really guilty."

Then he adds, "My nephew, Harry Melling, managed to get a part in the Harry Potter movies as Dudley Dursley. At that point my sister decided to move him from the state system into public school and I phoned her up and said, 'You traitor'. And she said, 'I know, I feel so guilty.' When she found out I'd got the job here she phoned me straight up.

"But it's a matter of survival. Maybe if I was 10 years younger I'd have carried on in the state system. I don't feel guilty any more.

"Teaching at Woodbridge is hard work, but it doesn't require as much discipline. You still have some disruption, but not of the same kind. The kids here are so focused on what they're doing.

"Now, instead of being shattered, I go home feeling quite elated - a bit like going home after doing a show. If you teach a good lesson it's the same kind of buzz.

"When I started teaching I treated it like doing nine shows a day. I wrote a script, learned it and performed it. I don't do that so much now because I've got used to how it works, but that was my security blanket at the start."

And does the veteran of so many TV roles act in character when he is teaching?

"All the time! They love it as well. I use all the techniques I've got to try to get some respect - once you've got that, you're set up."