Adrian Scarborough on The Chelsea Detective's future – and why he won't do a Gavin & Stacey spin-off

But it took until 2022, when The Chelsea Detective first aired, for Scarborough to be cast in a lead role on screen. Scarborough was actually ready to cut back on television work, but the part of DI Max Arnold convinced him to change his mind. “I never expected to go down this road,” says the 57-year-old who is now promoting the third series of his detective drama.

“Playing the lead isn’t a responsibility that I really enjoy. People start looking at you like you must know the answer, because you’ve been there from the beginning.”

Arnold and his partner DS Layla Walsh (Vanessa Emme) solve cases in the London borough of Chelsea, and in the new season’s first episode, a body is found in an allotment. Scarborough enjoyed watching John Thaw in Inspector Morse growing up and says Arnold has a bit of “bumbling Columbo” about him.

It’s cosy crime at its finest. There’s no swearing, no sex and no bloodshed. “It appeals, because there’s quite a few people out there, myself included, that don’t like too much gore,” says Scarborough. “The crimes themselves are almost irrelevant. The most interesting bit is the process of working them out.”

Scarborough was born in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire. His father was a teacher and his mother was a lay worker at the local Methodist church, who inspired his love of theatre by taking him at a very young age. “I wanted to be a dancer, but it was very obvious from about the age of eight or nine I didn’t have the physique,” he says. “As soon as I saw that acting was a job you could do, I thought it was for me. My parents never turned up their noses and went, ‘You’re never going to be an actor, don’t go on the stage.’”

He describes himself as a “disaster at school” and was his happiest when he left at the age of 16. “I don’t think school catered for the person that I was. My creative side wasn’t nourished. I’m a very practical person, so I learn by being active and doing. I don’t learn by reading or sitting.” He went on to attend Brooksby Melton College, where his love of acting was encouraged, and then he studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

He recalls his first on-screen role in The Bill in 1991, when he had to drive a truck across an airfield. “I used to do what I call SAS acting,” Scarborough explains. “You essentially get parachuted into a job, you’re there for three days, they shoot all of your stuff, and you’re gone again. That had its own set of problems – you never got to be part of a family.”

Now, he tries to make all the guest stars in The Chelsea Detective – which this series includes Alex Kingston (A Discovery of Witches, Doctor Who) as US ambassador Emily Morgan – feel as welcome as possible. “We try to make everybody’s journeys on the show a happy one, partly because I’ve had some s**t experiences in my time. I would hate anybody to come on our set and go away with that sort of experience. It’s hard walking into a space where you don’t know people and you’re expected to do big, emotional scenes or violent stuff, or be angry. It can be really tricky getting yourself to that place in a very short space of time when there’s not a lot of trust about.

“You get on a gig where people have been doing it for a very long time, perhaps too long, and they get used to doing it in a particular way, and they don’t want to do it any differently. You don’t feel welcome or comfortable – you feel like cannon fodder. Those experiences have an impact – more of an impact than the good times you have. They can upset you and play havoc with your confidence.”

How did he keep going? “Well, sometimes I didn’t actually. I took time out or went off and did something completely different.”

The Chelsea Detective is very different to “SAS acting”. It takes five months to film, with a couple of months’ prep before that, and involves a lot of long days. “This takes up a massive chunk of my life. Your loved ones become impatient, and sometimes tempers are thin…” says Scarborough. He lives with his wife, psychotherapist Rose Blackshaw, in Hertfordshire. Their children, Esme and Jake, no longer live at home.

“We try to be as communicative as we can, but it can be hard to find time to get together. You have to go, ‘OK, you can have me for an hour and a half here, you can have me for this much of Saturday, but the rest of the day I need to sit down and work out next week’s scenes and script, and I need a bit of time to myself.’”

Scarborough didn’t expect for The Chelsea Detective to run as long as it has, and believes “all gigs have a finite life”. He praises Gavin & Stacey for knowing when to end. The final episode, which aired on Christmas Day last year, brought in more than 12 million viewers.

Would he ever do a spin-off with Julia Davis, who plays his on-screen wife Dawn? “I don’t think so. One of the reasons why Peter and Dawn were so delicious was that you didn’t have to have a full half-hour of them. I think you’d get exhausted pretty quickly with the highs and lows of that relationship. It would just get so frantic and mad so quickly that I’m not sure it’d sustain for six episodes, but Julia is a genius. She’s also the worst corpser [an actor who laughs uncontrollably during scenes] I have ever met!”

What about The Chelsea Detective? DI Arnold could probably carry on for years, solving hundreds of cases, but would Scarborough want to? “You shouldn’t outstay your welcome. You have to be careful that you don’t get bored and complacent, particularly in this genre. You can tell when your heart’s not in it, but I haven’t reached that stage yet!”

It’s safe to say Scarborough won’t be requiring a parachute any time soon.

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The Chelsea Detective airs on U&Drama at 8pm on Wednesday 21st May.

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