Interview: David Hayman - Watching the detective

Published on Thursday 17 December 2009 18:57

DAVID Hayman is in mid-flow. "I got into a taxi in Glasgow recently and the driver recognised me and asked what I'd been up to," the veteran actor is saying in his distinctive Glaswegian brogue.

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"I told him I'd just finished a documentary on Sherlock Holmes and he turns around and says, 'You're kidding son! I've just read his 22 short stories, aren't they brilliant?' It blew me away."

Perhaps Hayman shouldn't have been surprised. The man with the deerstalker and the pipe is most definitely back in fashion.

On Boxing Day, Guy Ritchie's much anticipated Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson, hits cinemas, while next weekend, a documentary on Holmes and his Scottish creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, airs on STV. For Hayman, who not only narrates the programme but carries out his own investigation into the life of one of our most venerated authors and his fictional detective, it was a chance to explore a childhood passion.

"As a kid I really enjoyed reading the Sherlock Holmes novels," he says. "It's always stayed with me. Holmes was the first superhero. A character who has super-intelligence, super abilities, and manages to put all the chaos of the world into some kind of order. People feel safe in the presence of Sherlock Holmes, like we do with Batman or Superman or the Incredible Hulk."

Hayman suspects that Holmes's current popularity is, much as it was when he first appeared in print in 1887, a result of the current social climate.

"The world really was in turmoil at that time (when the first Holmes story was published]. There was great change going on – massive poverty and disease, exploitation of the gap between the rich and the poor, and people were fearful. It's very much like what we are feeling today with the banking collapse and the credit crunch, and the war in Afghanistan."

There is, it must be said, something of a resemblance between the 59-year-old Hayman and the Holmes's usual representation. His long, craggy face and distinctive profile are so reminiscent of the fictional detective that even Stephen Fry, one of the contributors to the documentary ("what a wonderful brain" Hayman says of him, in true luvvie style), remarks on it.

"I would have loved to have played Holmes," Hayman laments. "No I'm too old, dammit. There would need to be rather a lot of airbrushing."

A familiar face on screens now for over 30 years, Hayman first rose to prominence in 1979, when he played the part of former Glasgow gangster turned sculptor Jimmy Boyle in the film, A Sense of Freedom. Since then he has balanced roles in the theatre with turns in several Hollywood movies, including The Jackal with Bruce Willis, The Tailor of Panama with Pierce Brosnan, and most recently as a Jewish prisoner in last year's epic tale about life inside Auschwitz, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.

But he is probably best known for his long-running turn as the no-nonsense detective Chief Superintendent Michael Walker in Lynda La Plante's Trial & Retribution, which has just finished a tenth series on ITV1. That's ironic, he says, since the fact that he was cast in the part at all was a miracle. "When I was first sent the scripts they read 'Enter Walker, tall, dark and handsome in his early thirties'," he says with a smirk. "So they got a midget balding Glaswegian in his early forties."

There are, though, comparisons between Walker and Holmes, he says. "We wanted to make Walker old-school, what they call an old soak, an intuitive cop who has a great nose and can sniff out a baddie at 100 paces.

"He cuts to the core of the matter by following his instinct and his hunch is great. In that way he's very similar to Sherlock.

"Nowadays you've got your policemen who come straight from police colleges and they're still squeaky clean. They haven't been on the beat and they haven't got their hands dirty. It's an academic approach. Walker is one of the last of a dying breed – one of the dinosaurs."

Hayman found the process of creating a documentary fascinating but arduous. "For 30 years of my life I've been a performer. The director told me to just be yourself, but that's the most difficult thing to say to an actor. You feel stripped in a way. You have no protection and you feel very, very vulnerable."

The documentary explores, among other things, Conan Doyle's early life in Edinburgh, where he grew up in a Scottish and Irish family in the New Town, and looks at the influence the city had on him, particularly in reference to his education. It also peers into the life of Dr Joseph Bell, a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh's medical school where Conan Doyle studied, and upon whom he modelled the figure of Holmes. Hayman says that he sometimes feels that despite the strong connections, Conan Doyle's Scottishness is often forgotten.

"I don't think we celebrate him enough. We've given away one of our birthrights in a sense. He's a feather in our cap, because Conan Doyle was a product of Scotland. I think we could stake more of a claim on him, and on Sherlock too."

Hayman is also known for his blunt views and left-wing approach in life. Discussing a film he has recently made about the banking crisis, he veers into his own anger at the situation.

"I think we should all be up in arms," he says passionately. "It's disgraceful and a real slap in the face the way the bankers are behaving. I'm very, very angry about what's happened. At the moment the bankers are running the country, not the government. We've seriously got to get tough."

In 2001, Hayman established his charity Spirit Aid, which aims to help impoverished children around the globe. Operating from a modest office in Glasgow, it has gone on to found a school in Malawi, an orphanage in Sri Lanka (set up after the tsunami) and two mobile medical units and a small school in the Hindu Kush, in northern Afghanistan. It also runs a number of projects in Glasgow looking after vulnerable women and children.

Criticism is often levelled at celebrities who dabble in charity, but Hayman, who works with the charity whenever he is not filming and spends significant amounts of time overseeing projects abroad, seems genuine.

"We have five and a half million people in Scotland, and one in five of us gets out of bed in the morning to and works voluntarily to help others," he says.

"That's an extraordinary statistic, one of the highest in the world. We naturally have a good humanity running through our veins, we always have had in Scotland, and I think we have a great sense of 'we're all in this together'. I'm certainly not alone in doing something like this."

It's clear, though, that his choice to travel to Afghanistan regularly – he will be out there in early February 2010 and tries to get to the country at least once a year – does not come without a certain amount of internal struggle. When I ask him how his family feels about him travelling in the country (he has a wife and three sons), he puts his head in his hands.

"Um, that's a hard question to answer." He pauses. "Obviously my wife is not happy. But she realises that I'm committed to it and it's my work. She knows, and my sons know, that I take really good care of myself and I trust my team out there implicitly."

During his last trip, however, he found his movements severely restricted, partly because the Taleban has recently moved into the area where his medical units operate. "Normally I would be fairly visible in the marketplace, bartering for clothing or food or medicines or supplies. But last February I had to keep myself covered up. They would tell me when I could get out of the wagon, which areas I could go and which I couldn't."

Then why go? "That's the only way you get to know and love and respect the culture of the place," he responds.

When he's not trekking through Taleban territory or appearing on the silver screen he is traipsing around the country trying to raise money and awareness. "Fundraising takes time," he says. "I wish I got paid for it! Then I'd be stinking rich! But then it would defeat the ethos of humanitarian work."

Next year he will appear in the forthcoming Burke and Hare movie, starring David Tennant and Simon Pegg, another film that will see him rattling around the old streets of Edinburgh, and he will also be making a film with John Landis, the man who directed Michael Jackson's Thriller video. But he will, he promises, still make time to pick up the odd Holmes story.

"There must be a magic ingredient that spans the aeons of time and keeps him relevant," he reflects. "Holmes could look at someone and tell you what they did for a living, whether they were married, how many kids they had and what part of the country they were from. That's extraordinary."

Even, it seems, to a Glasgow taxi driver.

&#149 The Search for Sherlock Holmes, STV, Monday 28 December, 9pm