“TAKEN in 1974 to promote my single Pinball, this picture shows me visiting the switchboard operators at its distributors EMI. I’m wearing a wine-coloured cheap velvet suit and bow tie with a lilac frilly shirt.
Pinball got to No 22 in the UK singles chart and into the Top 50 in America, and my debut album of the same name did quite well off the back of that. But I was a bit conflicted about being a pop star. By that time I’d established myself as an actor.
Although I loved recording in a studio, I wasn’t comfortable with all the surrounding stuff. I was much happier in the theatre. At 26, I played Hamlet, and once you’ve played Hamlet there’s no turning back.
This is my favourite photo because it shows how eager I was then to please the publicity machine at Chrysalis, the record label I was on. I look like I’m enjoying myself but the hype quickly wore thin.
The second single, Fly Now, didn’t chart. I hung on and made three albums with Chrysalis until 1976, but my heart wasn’t in everything else you have to do. Chrysalis suggested I do a US tour but that didn’t happen, so eventually we parted company. Music and acting have been parallel careers for me, and I’ve kept working at both.
I appeared in the 1978 film Superman, but only got the part of the co-pilot in the president’s plane because the guy they cast had to pull out and I happened to be his size (for the costume). Then at the read-through for the 2005 BBC comedy/drama series Love Soup, Sheridan Smith really shone and it was very clear she was a star. And while filming one of the scenes I did with Diane Keaton in the 2017 movie, Hampstead, we chatted a bit and she was lovely.
I’ve most enjoyed the big American roles in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but working in Hollywood has never appealed to me at any point. Retirement is not a word in the vocabulary of most actors – they just go on until they drop.
Since 2013, I’ve narrated the Channel 4 series First Dates. The tone I have in my voice was the thing that got me the job, I think. I love doing it, and people just come up to me and say how much they love the show.
I met my wife Gilly in 1977 when we both worked at Theatre Royal, Stratford East. For our first date, we went to The Spy Who Loved Me in Leicester Square. Our son Billy is 37 and has been working as a bar manager. Our daughter Rosie is 34, a teaching assistant and the mother of our three grandchildren: Theo, 14, and twin girls Millie and Olivia, who are five.
Our home is a Victorian semi-detached in south-east London. It’s amazing what you can call a recording-studio these days – you just need a computer, and I do a lot of work on mine.
For the past 25 years I’ve collaborated with Steeleye Span musician Julian Littman, including several remixes on a three-CD set of my Chrysalis albums from 1974 to 1976, which has been released by Cherry Red this month.
In a 2015 interview, Noel Gallagher said he’d been inspired by Pinball, after Morrissey introduced him to the song in a Los Angeles bar. Pinball has sort of kept going over the past 46 years, which is lovely.”
A three-CD set, Brian Protheroe The Albums 1974-1976, is out now, released by Cherry Red.