Christopher Eccleston - Grouchy Northerner to Fantastic Time Lord

I find it hard to comprehend that almost three decades have elapsed since Christopher Eccleston first appeared on our screens. In my experience, nobody does tall, shouty but usually principled Northerners quite like him. Furthermore, his name in a cast list is one of the few which commands an almost cast-iron guarantee of the programme’s quality. While I was aware of his growing reputation in British films in the early Nineties, and probably saw him in episodes of Casualty and Inspector Morse, it wasn’t until his late twenties that he first made a major impression on me. 

It’s no secret that the acting profession is a very fragile one, and I daresay there remain thousands of fully-trained drama school graduates waiting for their Big Break. This son of Salford was 25 when making his professional stage debut, then came the film Let Him Have It, with TV parts in hot pursuit.  It was in 1993 that Eccleston first appeared in the new ITV crime series Cracker as the ambitious, young DCI Bilborough. 

He wasn’t the star. That status was reserved for Robbie Coltrane, whose performance as criminal psychologist Fitz rightly earned him three successive BAFTAs. The creator and lead writer was Jimmy McGovern who, in the coming decade became synonymous with tough, gritty Northern television drama. Therefore Cracker was no ordinary cop show. Conventions were frequently turned on their head which made it such compelling viewing. You never knew what was coming next, yet I remember the shock when Eccleston’s character was lured to his fatal encounter with a bayonet in the hands of serial killer Albie (Robert Carlyle). That particular three-parter remains possibly the most stunning example of crime fiction I’ve ever seen – “spellbinding”, I called it in my contemporary diary.

Like McGovern, Christopher Eccleston was also for a while to be associated with hard-boiled, uncompromising drama set in Northern England, just like the movies which had originally attracted him to acting. In ’95, I was moved to describe his “brilliant performance” in another McGovern work, Hearts and Minds. This time he played a young, idealistic teacher up against the system. In particular, his unorthodox way of making iambic pentameter engaging to a bored class was truly magnetic. 

The following year, he was another young, idealist, up against the, etc, etc. Peter Flannery’s Our Friends in the North could have been one of those BBC2 serials I sometimes tuck away in the pigeonhole labelled ‘Worthy but Too Difficult” but, like millions of others, I was hooked from the off. Much of the appeal of the production, which followed the lives of four Newcastle friends across three momentous decades, lay in the performances of the four leads. The supporting cast was to die for but Eccleston was the only star I’d heard of. Gina McKee, Mark Strong and a certain Daniel Craig were the others. Whatever happened to him? The Albie story in Cracker was memorable, but the finale to Our Friends…, played out to the then-current Oasis hit ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’, was a five-minute nugget of epoch-making TV gold.

Fast forward four years and Chris was back in Lancashire, albeit in a relatively minor role. He cropped up in a few episodes of Paul Abbott’s McGovern-esque Clocking Off, the classy cast of which read as a veritable who’s who of Northern acting talent, from Sarah Lancashire to Philip Glenister, Siobhan Finneran to Ricky Tomlinson. 

Various TV movies followed, before his career took what I considered an unexpected turn into left-field territory. In 2004, when the long-awaited reboot of Doctor Who reached the primary casting announcement, I was at first flummoxed. Christopher Eccleston? The DOCTOR?! Apprehensive that the successor to my childhood favourite show would founder on the decision to cast the familiar grouchy, miserable Mancunian as the much-loved lighthearted Time Lord, I watched the first part in 2005 with considerable anxiety. Of course, I needn’t have worried. The series was a huge hit. Even Dad enjoyed it! The Russell T Davies/Julie Gardner incarnation deftly retained ingredients from the original (Tardis, familiar adversaries, etc) while ramping up the special effects and making it a must-see drama for all ages.

From the moment he rescued Billie Piper’s Rose with an urgent “Run!”, Eccleston and his leather jacket wormed their way into my affections. When such an alien’s Northern accent was queried by Rose (let’s face it, we were all thinking the same thing), it was swiftly swatted away with something like “Why not?” Hmm, I mused, fair enough! It was even harder to reconcile the actor with such an enormous smile, habitually accompanied by his new catchphrase, “Fantastic!”, but he brought some genuine acting chops to that series. The episode with the last remaining Dalek in the universe, captive and emasculated, was as good as any I’ve seen. When in a later scene the Doctor yells an impassioned but uncharacteristically aggressive “Why don’t you just die?” the lonely old enemy’s perceptive retort was simultaneously chilling and thought-provoking: “You would make a good Dalek…” Ouch!

And yet, no sooner had he first appeared as the old Time Lord, word would leak that Christopher Eccleston would not be back for a second series. What? So soon? Instead he headed Stateside to rake in several fistfuls of dollars for roles in various sci-fi/fantasy ventures. 

The only one I watched, and purely because at the time I was living alone and there was little competition on Tuesdays at 9pm, was Heroes. Amidst a motley crew of reluctant heroes blessed – or cursed – with so-called ‘superpowers’, Eccleston played a twitchy invisible Claude, English accent unchanged, doing his best to thwart the evil bad guys seeking to exploit the powers for their own dastardly purposes. It was so compelling I even watched the entire series, although the novelty had worn off the following year. In any case, our Chris was no longer involved.

Indeed it was several years, and three house moves later, before I again caught him in a new production. BBC1’s Safe House featured Eccleston as an ex-cop who agrees to use his remote house in the Lake District as a refuge for potential victims of criminal reprisals and the two seasons proved to be superior thrillers. The star even seemed to indulge in some genuine lake swimming. 

However diving into open water in Sky Atlantic’s Fortitude was definitely inadvisable. The Arctic Circle environment was far too forbidding and hostile for such leisure pursuits. We only tuned in because of a limited-period Sky deal while we sat in our then-unfurnished living room in Saundersfoot, but we became hooked by the increasingly dark and frankly preposterous tale of unhinged polar bears and the even more unhinged Richard Dormer. Sadly, Eccleston’s contribution was brief. His research scientist character was murdered in the very first episode, one of a gruesomely impressive body count which also included Sofie Grabol, Michael Gambon and Ken Stott. Never mind, for a month or so it was perfect winter viewing.

His role in 2018’s Come Home was a meatier one, although some took exception to his Northern Ireland accent, and in The A Word, he is a nicely-judged comedy turn as the widowed granddad to an autistic boy. He’s not very good with people but adores young Joe. It’s another series set in The Lakes although this time he’s more into fell running than swimming. At the end of series two he collapses with a suspected heart attack so let’s hope he survives into the third run later this year, coronavirus permitting.

But then he’s Christopher Eccleston. Playing the same character for years doesn’t seem to be part of his career path, nor does it need to be. Whether as star or supporting, there can be few actors in greater demand, and justifiably so.