It was his biggest TV role, and playing the Cracker cop was turning him into a star throughout Britain. Then Christopher Eccleston said he'd 
had enough...

  It's not hard to picture Christopher Eccleston on a chat show. Perched on the sofa, he would squirm and fidget, mumble and dodge the questions 
he doesn't want to answer. And that's just about any question you can think of. 
  He is undoubtedly one of the best actors of his generation. His perfonnances in films such as Let Him Have It and Shallow Grave, alongside 
his TV work - notably in Cracker as DCI Bilborough, the cop dramatically killed off in the second series - and Hearts and Minds, as an idealistic 
young teacher, have won him rave reviews. 
  But off-screen Christopher is no rent-a-quote, no fund of anecdotes about his personal life. While arranging our interview, the lady from the 
BBC pointed out that it would be on his terms. Should you mention his private life just once, he will be out of there faster than you can say, 'By 
the way, are you married?' 
  He stands in the conference room of a Newcastle hotel and there's a quick 'hello' before he sits down, arms folded firmly over his chest, to 
speak in a voice that's little more than a whisper. The only time he shows any real enthusiasm is when we stray on to boys' talk football, and 
especially Manchester United. But he also loves his work, that's obvious. And he's very serious about it. 
  Christopher returns to our screens in one of the most ambitious TV projects ever, a £7million series called Our Friends in the North. An epic 
screened on BBC2 for the next nine weeks, it spans three decades and tells the story of four teenage friends from Newcastle from the mid-Sixties 
right up to the present day. 
  Interwoven with national and international events -corruption in politics, the miners' strike, terrorism, the porn industry and the perceived 
decline of morals in Britain Our Friends in the North is written by Peter Flannery (who wrote the Eighties tV series Blind Justice). It took 40 
weeks to film on 110 locations, and more than 3000 extras. Christopher plays Nicky Hutchinson, an idealistic left winger who burns with desire to 
change the world - a man sounds as serious as the actor playing him. 
  'I thought it interesting and a risk to play a man from the age of 19 to 52' says Christopher. 'It's an abitious project and it says things about 
the way we live. I wanted to do it because the writing is brilliant.' 
  'The character I play, Nicky, is idealistic and very driven and yeah, I can relate to that easily. All the characters are three-dimensional. I can 
understand their struggles and their desires.' 
  Just what struggles and desires Christopher may have had in his life we can only guess at. He was born in Salford, Manchester, and no, he didn't get 
into acting at school - he was probably more into watching The Reds. 
  'There were no school plays,' he says. 'I think I did one at sixth-form college and I quite enjoyed it and then I decided to apply for drama college 
and I got in. I wanted to go to London.' He did to a top London drama school, but then he had a long spell without any acting work at all. 
  'I didn't work for three years and I thought it wasn't going to happen for me,' he says, though he won't say what he did do during that time. 
  His film break came playing Derek Bentley in Let Him Have It, and in tv; after roles in Casualty , Boon and Inspector Morse, Cracker thrust him into 
the limelight as DCI Bilborough, a young detective trying to juggle the demands of job and family. 
  When Bilborough was killed off, stabbed in one of the most memorable tv sequences of recent years, everybody assumed Cracker writer Jimmy McGovern 
was responsible. 'No, it was my decision,' Christopher says. 'I knew that if I said I wanted to go I'd get a good exit. They didn't try to persuade me 
to stay - I think they knew there was no point.' 
  'People seemed surprised that I should have wanted to leave. But my character was settling down into being a furtherer of plots. All these actors 
would come in, the antagonists, and get these fantastic parts. AlII was getting was the occasional rant. 
  'I never wanted to play a copper in a long-running series like that but once I read the script I thought: "This is the sort of acting I want!" But 
you have to be quite functional within that sort of TV. You have to go with the plot. I had to have more faith in myself that I could do more than 
that guy. 
  'Leaving played right into Jimmy's hands because Cracker never gave you what you expected. Bilborough's death was perfect Cracker.' 
  He remains a big admirer of Jimmy McGovern - who also wrote Hearts and Minds - and says that his only concern when choosing a part is just how well 
written it is. 'Even if they say we've got so many million and X is doing this and y is playing that, it doesn't matter to me. 
  'Unless you have a good script there is no point, unless you are in it for other things and I'm not. I'm doing something that I love.'


Martyn Palmer.