Tom marches up another street

Eighteen million people have seen him in boxer shorts, and I arranged to meet him in the flesh.

To my disappointment, Tom Wisdom arrives for our rendezvous with strides on. He's 6ft 2in, dark haired, classic hunk material - but he hides it well in combat trousers and a snowboarding jacket. His baseball cap is pulled over his eyes, obscuring the handsome features that brought fan mail, flowers and frilly knickers, during the year he spent as sexy hairdresser Tom Ferguson in Coronation Street.

The 27-year-old actor is now playing the schoolboy lead in a revival of Another Country, the play celebrated among thesps for its ability to transform pouting post-public schoolboys into household names (Rupert Everett et al). I already know quite a bit about him, thanks to the indiscretion of his girlfriend Emma Linley. Emma, who stars in the soap Family Affairs, has been going out with him for seven and a half years - and last year decided that the nation's Sunday newspaper readers should know that the couple have sex on the kitchen table. Evidently Tom "knows all the right buttons to press" and their sex life is "absolutely incredible".

Tom, seemingly a sweet, quiet type, and apparently not the sort to dangle from chandeliers, colours when I remind him of the revelations. "It was one of her first interviews and she was badly guided," he says. "It was supposed to be about her character, but of course they managed to get it onto something else ... Emma was very distraught. I think they shuffled a few things around and misinterpreted what she said. But also it was naive and it was a mistake, and it won't happen again." Clearly not if he has anything to do with it. All he'll say about Emma is that she likes playing Scrabble.

They met at a drama class - and got together in front of their classmates. "We were in a communications class and had this foreign teacher who was really into being touchy feely. We were all standing in a circle and were told to express our emotions, so I just walked over and kissed her!" That night, they made love as they were "desperate to rip each other's clothes off" (that bit came from Emma - see above). They now share a flat in Islington, and every now and then think about going to bingo (that bit didn't).

Last year Emma had her work cut out, fending off Tom's admirers. After he was introduced to the Street, girls started chasing him around Manchester, offering him teddy bears and certain favours when he nipped out for a swift half. Emma's interview only fuelled their ardour.

"My popularity with women went up, actually. Maybe they thought: 'He's not so quiet and shy after all'."

The soap bosses knew they were onto something. He'd barely walked onto the set before the script writers were ordering him to get his kit off. In one scene, he had to answer the door wearing nothing but boxer shorts. "I was so nervous, I didn't eat the night before, and I didn't eat in the morning. I hadn't been working out or anything and there was bit of flab. I knew that 18 million people were going to see me, and I was supposed to be ... well ... a heart-throb."

He found his first day in the Rovers nerve-racking. "I really was shaking," he says. "I had a pint and it was spilling over the sides. I think they thought: 'Oh shit, he can't handle it!'"

As it turned out, that was just what they were thinking. A source revealed: "He was nicknamed Forrest Hunk before he arrived, but once he got here he was considered more wooden than the legendary Brian Tilsley [played by Chris Quinten]". After a year, Tom's character went off to stay with friends in Leeds ... and never came back.

New producer Jane Macnaught, whom he never even met, was reported to have been the axe-wielder. "It was a bit of a surprise! I didn't think they'd given me a chance to do anything, really,", he says. "She made the decision but never spoke to me about it. I arranged meetings with her, and they were cancelled. I was annoyed with her and the way she did it: I thought it was bad man management."

Tom left earlier this year, and the pain is still there. "I never wanted to ham it up," he protests. "I thought I'd try and keep it real. But actually, now I think I tried to play him too subtle." How does an actor recover from being regarded as too wooden for Coronation Street? It helps that he has stopped watching the soap, in part because he is too busy. He'll be playing the mischievous homosexual Guy Bennett in the tale of passions and politics in a buttoned-up English public school until December.