Eastbourne actor celebrates 50 years in TV and film

Jim will be at The Grove Theatre, Eastbourne Library, Grove Road, Eastbourne, BN21 4LT on Saturday, July 22 from 7.30pm-9pm when he will share memories of working on programmes including The Royal, Heartbeat, Emmerdale, The Royle Family, Last of the Summer Wine, Brookside, The Liver Birds, Home Fires, Coronation Street, Crown Court, The Return of Sherlock Holmes and Hollyoaks to name just a few. The night will feature plenty of clips of Jim in action as Jim tells how he went from being born into poverty in the back streets of Salford to following his dream of becoming an actor. Tickets are £10 each, with a raffle on the evening and a Q & A session with Jim in The Grove Theatre bar afterwards. Contact Michele at St Wilfrid’s for tickets on 01323 434224 or email [email protected].

Jim started out as a singer and amateur actor, going on to become a background artist and extra before graduating to the role of the small-part actor, in which guise he has been in around 50 episodes of Coronation Street and also just about every long-running northern programme you care to mention. Jim played four different parts in The Liver Birds. As he says it's the virtue of being a small part actor: you can always return in a different part a couple of years later.

The spur to the current talk, however, came when a friend at badminton told Jim he had seen him in a 1973 Last of the Summer Wine episode. His friend has since made it his mission to collect clips of Jim in all sorts of parts, and it is now these clips that Jim uses in his talks.

Jim has enjoyed working with all sorts of actors over the years, especially Bill Tarmey from Coronation Street who came from a similar background to his own. Jim is still working and last year was in a drama with Sir Kenneth Branagh which was shown on Sky Atlantic: “The ITV and the BBC didn't want to touch it because Kenneth Branagh was playing Boris Johnson and it was about Boris Johnson and all his shenanigans. I was playing a Covid victim as you can probably guess from my age!”

With a number of talks looking back over his career now ready, Jim enjoys speaking on cruises and has done so for P&O and Saga, a chance to share happy memories including the time he worked with Jeremy Brett, famously a TV Sherlock Holmes: “Jeremy Brett was absolutely super.”

Every day for the sake of continuity a Polaroid picture of Jeremy Brett in his costume would be taken, just to check that everything looked the same the next day. One day Jeremy invited Jim to be in a photograph with him: “He was an absolutely lovely man. His Sherlock Holmes is totally revered, particularly in places like Japan. They considered him like a God over there. But he was a very nice man and he treated the small-part players like equals for the time they were on the screen. I also worked with Ray Winstone and he was the same. I had a horrible attack of nerves and he helped me out with that.”