Robert Bathurst on "tricky" Casualty character – and Cold Feet's legacy 30 years on

"The garden and then the fields of the Weald in Sussex. I’ve been here about 25 years. It’s beautiful, but also very muddy, especially in January and February. It’s heavy, heavy clay, you see."

What’s your garden like?

"My wife Victoria is a very skilled gardener. She does flowers and I do vegetables. Every two weeks, I sow lettuce, mizuna, rocket and parsley. Then there’s various varieties of tomatoes, leeks, kale and purple sprouting broccoli. Anything the slugs like, actually."

Are you an outdoorsy person?

"Living in the country, I’m necessarily outdoorsy, but I do love it. Although I do like a bit of pavement as well."

What programmes are you currently enjoying watching?

"I’d be happy watching horse racing all day, every day. That’s how I’ll go gently into that good night if I’m not actually at the races."

Are you a gambling man then?

"No, it’s not the betting. It’s about the stories, the language and the journalism of it that I like. It’s the endeavour of it. To be a champion at all, you have to be prepared to lose 80 per cent of the time. It’s a sport about hope, not expectation."

Is that a bit like being actor?

"In acting, I find that enjoyment is only measured on a scale of disappointment, so if you’re not disappointed about a show you’ve done, that’s a result. Jobs are often really enjoyable to do, but they might also be rubbish. You don’t know they’re rubbish while you’re doing them – only when they’re on television."

You have joined Casualty playing surgeon Russell Whitelaw. He seems arrogant and a bit obnoxious…

"Or, he’s good at his job and has the authority of someone who has done that job for a long time. Some might find his way of dealing with others tricky, but he’s among the best in his field – and he’s definitely not shy to tell others that."

Casualty sends actors who are playing clinicians to shadow real-life surgeons and watch real operations. How did you cope with that?

"I had an access-all-areas day with a surgeon at a London teaching hospital, and despite being naturally squeamish, that was really useful for seeing operations – as well as to understand the hierarchical dynamic around the operating table and how to hold certain instruments. For the first operation I did, I had to remove someone’s spleen. When I was on the operating theatre set, the patient was all ready, open, all the organs there and the fatty layer. My first thought was, 'I’m never having toad-in-the-hole ever again!'"

Are you good in a crisis?

"I’m in awe of people who walk towards trouble or any kind of accident. I think people who are in the emergency services are superhuman, and I’m not. I’m very happy for them – expert, calm, dispassionate – to get in there first. I think that’s often misunderstood about medics and characters like Russell. In order to do the job, you have to be dispassionate, and that can be mistaken for not caring. They do care, but I don’t want a surgeon feeling my pain and empathising with me – I want a surgeon who can fix me."

Would you agree that Cold Feet, in which you played the posh, priggish David, was the first British kitchen island drama?

"Cold Feet was essentially about nothing apart from six people and how they got on. It was the first of those generally middle-class domestic shows, but what really made it stand out was that it was set, very firmly, in Manchester. Next year, it will be 30 years since we made the pilot, and in that time, kitchen island drama really has taken over the world."

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