`Now are you taping this or are you using shorthand?" actor Brian Murphy asks solicitously, "because I could change my speech pattern accordingly," he continues in his plummy RADA-trained tones. The voice is a surprise. You're sort of hoping for a bumbling, stuttering delivery - as in his most famous character, George, from the 1970s sit-com George and Mildred, but all you get is a clearly-enunciated, verging on posh, sound that betrays a lifetime of delivering his lines to the back rows of large theatres.
Due in Dublin to perform in Neil Simon's brilliantly funny two-hander, The Sunshine Boys, the charming Murphy knows that, despite all his varied and distinguished theatre work, people only want to talk to him about George and Mildred - and he doesn't mind in the slightest. "Oh, I've long since come to terms with it. People ask if I get fed up being saddled with George, but I don't see it that way. The only thing that might occasionally annoy me is that I've been constantly working over the years in theatre but people still see you as the one character. I had sort of made a name in theatre before George and Mildred came along, so the fact that I became well-known to a wider audience just allowed me more opportunities in the theatre because they were pleased to have a `name' on the bill."
It's difficult in these cable/digital days of "57 Channels and Nothing On" to appreciate just what a televisual phenomenon George and Mildred was. Playing alongside Yootha Joyce (who died in 1980), the pair were repressed suburbanites never happy with their lot and constantly falling behind the metaphorical Jones's next door. Mildred was a boozier, slightly better-looking Thatcher figure and George Roper was the sexually incompetent, feckless other half. The two were a saucy picture postcard brought to life, a mix of classic Ealing comedy and a bawdy Carry On romp. They originally surfaced in the lame Man About The House sit-but-little-com, but proved so popular with viewers that they got their own show.
"At its peak, the show regularly attracted 20 million viewers" says Murphy, "and myself and Yootha became overnight successes. You just wouldn't get that sort of rating now for a TV programme, but back then there were only three channels and TV closed down at midnight. Now there's far too much television on, and it never closes down."
The success made his life hell for a while. "I couldn't go anywhere, couldn't go to the shops or into a pub without someone making a remark about the character. And what people don't realise is that it was a huge hit all around the world. It was so popular in Australia and New Zealand that we actually went down there to do a stage version of the show. It was a big hit in Spain, where it was called Los Ropers, and Italy as well. To this day, I can't go into my local Italian restaurant without the owner coming over to me and addressing me as `Signor Roper'. It's quite bizarre."
In The Sunshine Boys he plays alongside Ron "Oliver" Moody, best-known for his role as Fagin in the film of Oliver Twist. "I've known Ron for years, worked with him briefly years ago and always got on very well with him." The play is about a legendary double-act, Willie Clark and Al Lewis, who, although, having a magical understanding on-stage, loathe each other off-stage. A very cleverly-scripted work about the dynamics of a double act, Murphy says he could draw from his own personal experience to flesh out the role.
"Willie and Al are like a marriage, and being married myself and having done a double act with Yootha Joyce, which was a bit like a professional marriage, I understood the role. What really helped me most in the role, though, was my own experience working with double-acts in variety theatre. I've seen how they work, both on and off stage, and also I've heard some great anecdotal stories about famous double-acts who hated each other."
Murphy is particularly pleased that, for the first time, Neil Simon, has allowed them to adapt his work and "anglicise" the show. "It's quite a coup, because normally anybody doing this, has to do it as an American double-act complete with the accent. But for some reason, I don't really know why, he's allowed us to make small changes here and there and do it as an English double-act."
Saying it's the first time he has acted in a Simon play, he rattles off a huge and impressive list of his other theatre work, which includes appearances in Hamlet, Dick Whittington, Sweeny Todd, Run For Your Wife, The Merchant of Venice.
The last two shows, in particular, characterise his duel serious/comedy acting life. "I was trained at RADA and always did `straight' theatre starting off. I was always in work, except for a bleak period just before I turned 40 when I was seriously going to give it up. I actually told my agent I was leaving the profession and was going to start selling insurance. But quite literally on my 40th birthday I landed the role of George Roper.
"Since that I've mainly, but not always, been cast in comedy roles, although I have done shows like Jonathan Creek and Casualty where I've played people as far away from George as you could think possible. I've always, though, gone back to the theatre. I find that theatre audiences are much more generous, they accept you as the character you play without reference to your TV character. But I suppose it's the old thing - you can spend years in theatre doing decent work then you get your face on television and that's all anybody knows you as."
His last major television appearance was in Caroline Aherne's Mrs Merton and Malcolm. "Oh, I adored working with Caroline, such a talented lady. She was very brave doing that because she had just come out of a very sticky period in her personal life. I played the neighbour, Arthur, and what I found really different about it was that the humour was very droll and very dry. It wasn't like the sitcoms I used to be in, which would have been more up-front funny. Also, there was no live audience or laugh track on the show, which was very different to how we used to do George and Mildred."
With George and Mildred now attracting a new generation of fans, thanks to repeats on the Granada Plus channel and vidoes of the show still selling briskly, Murphy says he's noticed an up-turn in the recognition factor - with more and more people referring to him as "George". "People still come up to me and say `we've got George and Mildred living next door to us' And that's the whole point of the show - nobody ever recognises themselves, nobody ever thinks that they are George and Mildred."
The British touring production of The Sunshine Boys by Neil Simon, with Ron Moody and Brian Murphy, is at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, from Monday until Saturday.