Ricky's rise to Roylety

In America they have The Simpsons. Here we have the Royle Family, the descendants of a lineage of grotesque working-class families that began with the Glums and continued through the Garnetts. The Royles are more hopeless than either. At least Pa Glum had the ambition of his social pretensions and Alf Garnett the passion of his political convictions. Jim Royle barely has the energy to switch TV channels. Tony Blair is unlikely, however, to implore us to shape up and become less like the Royles and more like the Royals, which would be the equivalent of George Bush Snr's famous pledge to make the American family less like the Simpsons and more like the Waltons. Say what you like about them, but our unregal Royles prove one old saw: the family that watches Ready Steady Cook together stays together.

I'm off to Liverpool to see sedentary, raggedybearded Jim, which is to say I'm interviewing Ricky Tomlinson, the actor who plays him with such devotion that for the series' six-week shoots he washes neither hair nor clothes. Jim "my arse" Royle is anally fixated, sarcastic, idle and a low-level bully. His schadenfreude revels in the minor, cheese-grater related accidents of others. Yet, like all the Royles, a vein of sentimentality runs through him, a sentimentality that on occasions such as his daughter Denise's wedding day is, admittedly, indistinguishable from real love.

Tomlinson blends these elements as smoothly as a Magimix. What you will not find in his portrayal, however, is fury. For that you must catch a newly released little movie, Nasty Neighbours, which Tomlinson believes contains his finest work. He plays Harold Peach, a busybody who loses his job, falls out with his flash new neighbours and goes mad. In one disturbing sequence, Peach and his nemesis, Phil Daniels, fight bare-knuckle in their back garden. I say to Tomlinson, when we meet in a hotel bar by the station, I thought he'd lost his rag for real.

"We bloody did. We had to. We had to be going for it. I mean, I'm a lot heavier than Phil so when he threw me they were real falls. Bruised black and blue I was. Phil's as mad as a March hare by the way: when he kicks off he kicks off. Yes, we were fighting. He was rubbing me face in the shite, of course he was."

He may be 61 and 5ft 8in, but Tomlinson tips the scales at 17 stone. Daniels probably thought he was fighting for his life. In Daniels's stupendously selfish character, Robert Chapman, Tomlinson saw one of Thatcher's children, a sight guaranteed to bring out the Herod in him. In contrast, Mr Peach was one of his own.

"There are plenty of people in the position of Harold Peach, going bonkers to make ends meet, keep a roof over their heads. It seems awful to me that in this day and age people who've worked hard and struggled to buy their house, through lack of income can have it repossessed. I think there should be a law to stop that. I've been there. I've lost a property, see. I've had my house repossessed same as Harold Peach. I know exactly what he was going through." Tomlinson's Mystery Play face, with its tramp's beard and raspberry nostril (a living proof that things do get worse if you pick them), turns from grey to pink when he speaks of all this. He has huge passion for the Left-wing politics that have run through his 20-year career as an actor, from his role as the shop steward Bobby Grant in the early summer of Brookside, through his prize-winning Ken Loach films, to ITV's drama-documentary Dockers last year, in which he steeled himself to play a "scab". He confesses with considerable understatement that he is not exactly a Blairite or a New Labour man. "I didn't see much wrong with old Labour."

In fact, his fame as a political activist predates his acting celebrity. For most of the Sixties he worked in the building trade. In 1972 he found himself in the middle of a national building strike and was jailed for two years for refusing to testify against a pack of pickets who had descended on a Shrewsbury building site screaming: "Kill, kill, kill the capitalist bastards." In prison, he refused to wear prison uniform and went on a hunger strike for 22 days. He still regards himself as a political prisoner and believes that one day he will be pardoned.

"That's as sure as eggs is eggs. I mean, the judge was outrageous, didn't have a clue. I don't know whether he's alive or dead now - I hope he's dead; he should be. There will be plenty of hot water where he is." Sir Hugh Mais died in 1996.

Sometimes I get the impression that life really makes sense to him only when it can be subjected to simplistic political explanation. In his youth he was briefly a member of the National Front, a symptom, he now says, of immaturity. He is much less certain and dogmatic talking about emotions and personal relationships. He does, however, volunteer that it was his obsession with politics, catalysed by reading The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist in prison, that eventually did for his marriage to Marlene - a factory cleaner and a "marvellous mother" to his three children - who was not political at all. He believes the scar left by his time in prison never healed in her. In 1986, at the age of 48, after 24 years together, he left her for 16-year-old Diane Fox, the step-daughter of his partner in a local night club venture.

"No, I don't think it was madness at all. It was just another page in the book of my life. It was nothing special or whatever. It was just one of them things that happen," he says when I ask what he was thinking of. Their affair lasted for a few years but in 1992 he met Rita, a social worker, who moved in with him. She is in her late forties.

He is vague, possibly embarrassed, when talking about Rita specifically, but he is not embarrassed to own up to harbouring a romantic side. As a teenager he wrote love poems, which he as quickly destroyed, and secretly went to see soppy movies. In jail he'd add "with love" to the bottom of the letters home he would write on behalf of illiterate but macho cellmates. From listening to the radio in his cell he grew to love opera, his favourite remaining Mozart's beautiful but cynical dissection of love, Cos" fan tutte. All fear of high culture left him. The poetry started again. He'd consider playing Lear if anyone asked him.

With me, however, his lyricism is confined to descriptions of his relations. He comes, he says repeatedly, from a family of "grafters". (A bit of me thinks that only hereabouts would this count as a defining characteristic.) His mother Peggy, now 85, took three jobs to support the family. "I love her to bloody pieces," he says. His father Albert was a baker, another grafter, who died at 55 of lung cancer. For weeks after he was admitted to hospital, Ricky could not face visiting him. Eventually his eldest brother persuaded him.

"He was in this huge ward. I'll never forget. He was standing there at the end and he was only a small man, a slight man, beautiful, a lovely man, and I went and gave him something daft like a bar of chocolate - he never ate sweets - and I put my arms round him and kissed him and I started crying. Rough, tough Ricky Tomlinson who was frightened of no one! He just said to me, 'I know.' He knew why I hadn't seen him. He said, 'It's OK. I know. Take me home.'"

The Tomlinson brothers took turns sleeping by him in the parlour. Just before the end, he asked Ricky to put him into a pair of red pyjamas. "You see, he was a mad Liverpudlian."

I am reminded, I am afraid, of The Royle Family's Christmas Day edition last year: Jim on the bathroom floor spilling out his love for Denise, Ave Maria on the portable cassette player, Denise's waters breaking. But Tomlinson would not mind that. "That," he says, "was a bit special for me because that was like me and my daughter. She was born on Christmas Day too. It was easy doing it. I meant it. Caroline [Aherne] was Katie for me."

I would guess that Aherne, the genius who not only plays Denise but cowrites the show, was rather more aware of the irony tiptoeing around the pathos. After all, Jim assures Denise she will be a wonderful mother. This season's episodes have demonstrated the exact reverse.

Tomlinson drifted into acting after a period club-compering. His new career made staccato, stop-and-go progress. Answering an advert in a paper, he won the lead role in Roland Joffe's United Kingdom in 1980 but was soon back working as an extra. In 1982, he was cast as Grant in Brookside. Again his acting was acclaimed but after six years he walked out complaining of the "totally unbelievable" changes being made to his character. This honourable departure propelled him towards chaos: Diane Fox, divorce, a drink-driving conviction, the collapse of his night club with debts his bank were still pursuing six years later. By 1988 he was on "skid row". It was, he says, Ken Loach who saved him by casting him as the unemployed Catholic father in Riff-Raff.

"I just wasn't interested in anything. My marriage had gone through a bad time and that knocked me for six. I was missing the kids, stuff like that. I just thought I'd get my head down for a bit."

So deeply did he bury it that when he won the Best Supporting Actor prize in Cannes in 1990, Loach had to put an advert in a local paper to trace him. He was back on track, yet, once again, events nearly conspired to destroy him. In 1993 he was tried and acquitted in Liverpool Crown Court of threatening to fire-bomb Pat O'Rourke, Diane Fox's stepfather. I say he must have feared a repeat of the Shrewsbury Affair and another jailing.

"Not at all, I knew I was innocent." But he was innocent the first time around? "But it was a political thing that. The state wanted us in jail."

I wonder if Tomlinson's periodic but spectacular disasters are not connected to his wariness about success. He appears to live in fear of becoming one of the local showbiz success stories he despises. Naturally, he doesn't want to mention names. "But they could show a little bit of solidarity! Tarby with all his gags and Cilla with her dad. He was a dock worker, Jimmy White was. They could've showed a bit of solidarity with them lads at the docks."

Perhaps, but he is surely in no danger of selling out? "That would terrify me, honestly it would terrify me." There follows an unnecessarily detailed account of how parking conditions on match days forced him to sell his old terrace house by Everton FC and buy an apartment overlooking the docks. "I said to Rita, 'For God's sake, Rita, am I selling out?' and she said, 'What are you talking about? We're only moving half a mile.'"

So the more famous Jim Royle gets, the more the actor who plays him cries "Fame, my arse!" His favourite tipple, cans of Sainsbury's mild, is provided for him at award ceremonies. He turns down cup final tickets because the "real" supporters are more deserving. He drives a VW polo and "battered old camper van" in which he takes Rita and Peggy to the Lakes. He takes part in endless charity events. He is about to open a small drama school.

"This sounds really, really corny and I don't give a shit: I'm 61 and I am going to live as long as I can to give back as much as I can. I've done some terrible things in my life. I've hurt people. Said things. I want to try and get rid of all that."

These terrible things will eventually feature in an authorised biography which three rivals are jostling to write. He will award the task to whoever promises to produce the portrait with most warts. I hope he is strong enough to take the truth unvarnished. "I'm the strongest person on earth," he says and Phil Daniels might agree. His co-star's heart is, however, purest Liverpudlian-Marxist marshmallow.