PROFILE
Where Are They Now? Victoria Bullimore talks to Tom Butcher
H
e still cuts a dash does Tom, exStamfordian and actor, but he’s too modest to admit to being a teenage heart throb back in the late seventies and early eighties. I remember well though, all those swooning High School girls in the audience as he strutted his gorgeous stuff on the stage of Stamford School Hall. Was it perhaps the prospect of a lifetime of female adoration that persuaded him to go into acting I wonder? “That wasn’t something that particularly interested me,” he says, “an hour or so of female adoration here and there was more than enough for a growing lad.”
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n 1991 Tom joined the cast of the daytime soap Doctors in the role of Dr Marc Eliot, and here he met and later married his co-star, the lovely Corrinne Wicks. Tom is a regular visitor to Stamford as he still has friends and family in the town. He has a special fondness he says, for Askers bakery on King’s Mill Lane because he worked there during the school holidays as a teenager. “I was tin sprayer, dough kneader, bun roller, doughnut jammer, tin emptier, stacker, peeler, cleaner, painter and unofficially, the young Tarzan. As a youth with quirky vocal chords I was able to make the Tarzan yell and there is in my memory an image of the young me, swinging from an upstairs beam in the bakery
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t all started when he was about 15. He took on several lead roles for Stamford School productions, including the part of King Henry VIII in A Man for all Seasons, for which he had to appear in yellow hose. “I got a laugh just for bringing my knees on stage,” he says. He always received high praise back then for his talent, but I ask him if any particular member of staff inspired him to become an actor. “The school plays I were in were directed by my English teacher, Mike Rice, and he was the one who put me on the road to becoming an actor. I owe him a debt of gratitude.” Tom left Stamford to study drama at what was then Manchester Polytechnic. His first professional job was in Corrie. “I played a policeman holding a folding notebook,” he recalls, “which acted as a shakyhand-nervous-ometer.” Then in 1989 he got his big break with The Bill playing PC Loxton, a role he continued for the next seven years. He was quite well known during this time; surely he has some good ‘crazy fan’ stories? “Once a very scary looking man came up to me as I was buying milk in Brixton where I was living at the time, and said he remembered me as the copper who had arrested him three years previously. He congratulated me on having been quick enough to catch him. I didn’t put him right.”
calling out to my jungle friends. Happy days. They were good to me; I enjoyed working there immensely. They still make the best bread and I always take some back to London with me.” Tom also has fond memories of the Wine Bar, which is now Fratelli’s restaurant on St Mary’s Hill. “It was there that I remember playing the drums in the vaulted cellar with the band Spede (taken from the Stamford School badge). On one occasion there was standing room only and the stairs were packed too. Aside from the fact that the cellar didn’t hold that many people anyway, a full house was still a full house and we were all rather chuffed that we had one.” I remember. I was there. Over the years Tom has had parts in Holby, Casualty and The Bradley Mysteries to name just a few. More recently he has worked with Colin Firth and Jim Broadbent in the film When Did You Last See Your Father?, and taken the part of a man driven to kill in Paul Andrew Williams’ urban horror/thriller Cherry Tree Lane. Currently Tom is rehearsing The Holly and the Ivy in Malvern for a five-week tour with the Middle Ground Theatre Company, which also stars his wife Corrinne.
And Finally... Do you like Marmite? Yes please. With lettuce, or marmalade and black pepper, with peanut butter or on its own with Askers bread. Bath or shower? Shower. Tea or coffee? Both. But not in the same cup. Cats or dogs? Cats. What’s your star sign? Cancer the crab. What are you reading? I’ve just finished ‘One Day’ by David Nicholls. What’s your middle name? Alfredo. Where were you born? Stamford Hospital. What was the last film you saw? The Untouchables. Do you have a crush on anyone? No crush today, thank you. • Tom will be appearing with Robert Powell and Joe Pasquale in Doctor in the House at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham, 10th-12th April.
STAMFORD Living FEBRUARY 2012
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