Street dreams

Bruce Jones and Les Battersby, his bestknown alter ego, have a few things in common - they are both working-class lads (Les's accent is the real thing), having been brought up in back-to-back terraced houses around Manchester. But the similarity ends there - unlike the uncouth, ale-swilling, work-shy lout that is Coronation Street's Les, Bruce Jones had a dream, from the age of three, when he was in a nativity play, to be an actor. And through single-minded determination he beat the odds and has built a successful TV and film career.

Acting was hardly an aspiration a Collyhurst boy could admit to: "Where I came from it was football, sport. You didn't tell anyone you was going to be an actor; you just didn't tell 'em, otherwise you'd have been a nancy pandy or something like that. You used to go to drama classes with your football boots hanging around your neck." But he never lost sight of the desire to act, ploughing away at night school, in scout plays, in amateur drama, while he worked at his day job as "a pipe-fitter, heating engineer - boilers and gas pipes and that". Eventually his doggedness paid off: He landed the lead role as Bob in Ken Loach's funny and moving piece of social realism, Raining Stones (1993), which has since become a cult film of sorts. "Whatever you want to do in this world you gotta have the dream to do it and I had the dream to be an actor. It's summat I've worked at and developed. I get all the jobs where I get beat up, though. I get all the fight jobs! But I enjoy it." And Coronation Street, especially, "fits like a glove. I'm not leaving the Street; as long as they want me they've got me."

He is passionate about the destruction of Collyhurst, the impoverished inner-city area of Manchester where he grew up: "It was back-to-backs like Coronation Street when I was a kid. You could go through the lofts as well, like Les did in the show," he says, referring to a Corrie plotline. "They were brilliant communities - you could leave your front door open all day and all that. And then they decided to pull them down, whatever council or government we had at the time. And they destroyed all them communities and put them in skyscraper flats where no one wanted to go, and these new housing estates of the '60s that were crap. That's why we've got what we've got today. I blame them people what destroyed them communities - it's why we've got all this violence and everything. They should have left us alone.

"It's a sin what they did, they ruined people's lives and they never even gave us a thought. We were suppressed people I think. We still do it now - we do as we're told. Whatever the government says we do, we do. If we were in France we'd be out on the streets."

There's a real anger here, worthy of a Ken Loach film. But it was a long time, and a hard grind, before Jones came to make his Loach film. "My dad didn't like the idea of me being an actor when I was a kid but I've no problems with it myself. My dad was just - `you're not being an actor, you get a proper job'. But I carried on anyway. I never let the dream go. Even when I wasn't acting every day I dreamed of it . . . I see kids now and they've got dreams of being actors in areas I grew up in and I think that's brilliant."

For the last 18 years Bruce Jones, father of four, grandfather to six, has lived a long way from Collyhurst - in Marple, a village near Stockport in Cheshire, where he has banned Coronation Street as a topic in his local pub.

HE spent four years performing in the workingmen's clubs of the north of England: "It was to get an Equity card. I was in a comedy double act with my mate Eddie Clarke. We won top act of the year for four years running. I was the idiot and my mate was the straight guy. We'd dress up in costumes, tell gags, like Morecame and Wise." Where's Eddie Clarke now? "He's compering now, still in the clubs. He's a good singer." But Jones landed a commercial with Ken Loach. He tells the story of how, months later, Loach called him up to ask him to audition for a small part in a film he was making, how he called him back again and again - six times in fact - before Jones realised he was actually being auditioned for the lead.

He was perfect for Bob in Raining Stones, a role he played with passion, humour and sensitivity - an unemployed man who tries a series of scams to get the money for his daughter's Communion dress (Tom Hickey played the local priest). For the man who had been part of a comedy act in the clubs it was a giant leap up several steps at once. "Then next minute I was in Cannes and being hailed as this actor who's been around awhile and never . . . and suddenly he's up there now with the big guys."

The success of the film - Jones won European Actor of the Year at Cannes - meant he had to give up the day job, from which he had taken six weeks off for filming, when his workplace was besieged by the press. ("No one was getting any peace at work.") He has never looked back. "It's been quite a busy four or five years" - two years in Roughnecks, the TV series set on an oil rig, a Heartbeat Christmas special, working with Bob Hoskins on Shane Meadows's Twentyfourseven (released last week), a cameo role in The Full Monty (for which he won an Actor's Guild award), Bob's Weekend (not released yet), the possibility of another Meadows film and more work with Hoskins. "I've not worked with a bad director yet. One of the secrets with me and directors is they let me go - I'll work all day long for them to create . . . I try and see it in my mind what they're trying to create for me." And of course the role of Les Battersby on Corrie, guesting at first, then moving in as part of the family from hell - wife Janice, daughters Leanne and Toyah, all bangers and rudeness and blaring ghettoblasters. The street has, of course, warmed to the Battersbys, who have been humanised - no one can be all bad in cosy Corrieland.

"The first day you walk onto the set you think, God I've known these people all my life." On his first day, Les had a row with Ken Barlow, played by Bill Roche: "I had to slam the door on his face and I thought, Oh my god, me mum will kill me. I've slammed the door in Ken Barlow's face - that was my first thought. Then I had to head-butt Curly."

The fame, the recognition factor, from Corona- tion Street is huge. "You're never ready for it." (Although people still call him Bob in Manchester, because of Raining Stones. "They say, `oh, you're Les now'.") He has been hit with an umbrella twice and, in a bar in Manchester with two friends, an old lady came up to him and said "get a proper job you bastard; I was married to a bloke like you but he's dead now thank God," and walked out.

When we met in the Stephen's Green Centre in Dublin, where he was doing a publicity stint, people came up to him freely to have a chat, ask for autographs (no umbrellas here). The voice is the same but they may have been surprised by his courteous manner and neat clothes - jeans and casual jacket and no sign of Les's sweaty vest. So, what about Les - who frankly has a lot less to recommend him, than say, Bob in Raining Stones, a character of considerable depth and sympathy: "Les could grow with it. I think he is still going to be a bit of a rogue. I think everybody's going to get to like him. I mean, they like him now on the street. They like him and they can blame him. If anybody's got a worry on their shoulders they can blame Les, and if he walks in they can take it out on Les because he doesn't care. He's in his own world. Oh right, fine, shout at me. I'm all right. You'd sympathise with Les sometimes, Les is easy to shout at."

Battersby's trouble-making-scamming-bad-back-syndrome ways have entered the public's imagination. "My mum went to bingo and something had happened to the machines and some balls were missing and the bingo caller said `Bloody hell, Battersby's been here'. And after Les head-butted Curly, the `Battersby kiss' became part of the conversation of life."

It has been a long journey from the grim streets of Collyhurst to the leafy lanes of Marple and fame as a star of Britain's longest-running soap. A role in Coronation Street was like coming home: "I watched it from day one. I used to sit with my grandmother and I said to her, `one day I'm going to be in this show' and she said `oh yeah, sure'. She was never alive to see it but she'll know, somehow."