by Jenny Tabakoff

Here to promote the ABC's Burnside, Christopher Ellison is as menacingly inscrutable as his famous creation. "I'm fed up with the whole bloody thing," he tells Jenny Tabakoff. 

"Who'd be a copper? I can't believe anyone would want to be a policemen [sic]," says Christopher Ellison, who has made a living out of just that for more than a decade. 

Or is it Frank Burnside talking? Sometimes it is hard to separate the actor from his role as The Bill's most memorable copper. For 13 years Ellison has lived with Frank Burnside, now about to be seen in Australia in his own eponymous six-part spin-off series. DCI Burnside has come a long way from Sun Hill. These days he's working with the National Crime Squad, cracking major crime. 

Up close, Ellison is an odd combination of menace and charm, with the same hail-fellow-ill-met manner as his fictional creation. Burnside (or Frank, as Ellison calls him) is loved by The Bill aficionados for his unorthodox methods, such as putting a suspect's head down a toilet to flush out information. I ask Ellison how he remembers that particular episode. 

"From above," he says. "Ha, ha, ha."

There it is, that mirthless laugh. Ellison is no effete acting type: his square body, wrap-around glasses, cocky walk and dropped aitches belong to his former careers as a merchant seaman, minicab driver, sex-shop manager and demolition worker. 

But back to the toilet episode. 

"Poor bloke, I felt really sorry for that actor," says Ellison. "We had to do it about six times. They'd dry 'im off and then, 'ello, whack! - I'd be sticking 'is 'ead down the toilet again..." 

At this point Patrick, a teacher who has won an ABC trivia competition to join Ellison for lunch, volunteers the information that later on Mr Toilet Head got shot in the legs. 

"Oh, 'e did, didn't 'e," exclaims Ellison, turning an admiring gaze on Patrick. "'E remembers better than I do. Gawd, poor bastard, 'e got shot as well. Hey, good part."

Lunching with Ellison is like that, a curious amalgam of fact and fiction. The actor is at the end of a hard week promoting The Bill and Burnside, and he seems to be in an unusually Frank frame of mind. 

He is tired of talking Bill trivia and of being asked to autograph books as "Frank Burnside" or with that character's catchphrase - "you're nicked". After all, it is two years since he left The Bill and more than a year since he made Burnside. 

"I won't sign," he says. "I'm fed up with the whole bloody thing." 

There it is: The Stare. Frank Burnside has a habit of staring down the camera, and Ellison can pin a hapless interviewer with the same unblinking blue gaze. 

I ask him where The Stare comes from. 

"I think it comes from boredom... People think it's really menacing, but it's like, 'I wish this f---ing scene would end'." 

Then, more seriously: "You're always told not to blink on camera - well, not too much, anyway - because it's offputting. And if you can hold a look, it's kind of good." 

Ellison did not aspire to be an actor. Brought up in working class West London, he went through a succession of jobs, trained as a graphic artist and even emigrated briefly to Canada in his late teens ("Too bloody cold," he says). While managing a theatre outside London, he was offered a part. 

"I got an agent straight away - very, very quickly. They sent me off to drama school - well, a sort of drama school - and I learnt the rudiments." 

His first TV role, he says, was in the last episode of Emergency-Ward 10, the British hospital soap that starred Australian actor Bud Tingwell. ("I met 'im at the Logies and told 'im about it," recalls Ellison.) 

Ellison quickly began to specialise in villains. He auditioned for a role in The Bill when it started in 1983, but turned it down because he wanted a juicier part. He did turn up in an early guest role, however, playing a detective - "a bad character who'd come in from another station... [who] just caused grief wherever he went. His name was Tommy Burnside, until they found out there was a Tommy Burnside in the Met - a real one - and he was having rather a bad time..." 

Ellison rejoined the cast in 1988 as Frank Burnside, a role that The Bill's original writer, Geoff McQueen, tailored to Ellison. Burnside was rough and tough, a rule-bender who trod a fine line between straight and crooked and had a mysterious private life. He quickly became one of The Bill's most popular characters. Then, in 1993, Burnside vanished. 

"He'd left to go 'undercover'", says Ellison, "which was a convenient way of saying that I'd left before they had time to write me out." 

In real life, Ellison had tired to the two-episodes-a-week shooting schedule. 

"It's a hard way of working. Tough for me as well, 'cos I was always in it. 

"In fact, the Burnside character - I think they overused it in the end. Somebody said it became a kind of dramatic shorthand. If they wanted to spark up an episode, they'd shove a Burnside scene in. You'd find you were in every episode... It was too much. So I just thought I'd give it a rest, give everybody a rest." 

In 1998, however, Burnside was back on The Bill, and apparently an out-and-out villain (though it later emerged he was still undercover). In real life, Ellison had been tempted back by lots of money and the promise of his own series. 

So, has Frank Burnside changed or is he the same as he was on The Bill? 

"He's a bit more devious," says Ellison. "He's a bit wiser. He's become more manipulative, I think. He knows he's got to be like that because the world has become a more high-tech, politically correct place, so he has to duck and dive a bit more to avoid all that." 

In the first episode of Burnside, however, the DCI isn't afraid to use unorthodox tactics in an elevator to scare information out of a suspect. And he's happy to say he's nicking someone for "possession of an offensive mouth". 

Ellison thinks Burnside is "a bit darker" than The Bill. It is also glossier and more tongue-in-cheek. Frank Burnside is a dinosaur in this brave, new PC world, but wins his colleague's grudging respect. 

Does Ellison like his alter ego? 

"Oh, yeah, of course I do. He's bought me a nice boat, he's bought me a house in Portugal. I think he's great. Ha, ha. I think he's fabulous." 

Though Ellison may appear swamped by his most famous character, he insists that, to him, Burnside is just another role. 

"I don't feel affiliated with the guy. He was just a character I played, a script that dropped through the door every week and there he was. I just picked him up and put him down." 

Home for Ellison is strictly private. He concedes, grudgingly, that he is married to an ex-dancer and that they have two children. [Strictly private? That'd explain the Woman's Own pics then ;-)] 

Burnside's private life is also limited to a few glimpses. There was a hint, years ago, that he was divorced. Apart from that, viewers have to surmise what they can from the glimpses they get of him "sitting in a pub with a bird", as Ellison puts it. 

How does he imagine Burnside's private life? 

Probably a raving iron. Iron 'oof [poof]. Ha, ha. Cross-dresser. Frank the tran!' 

Ellison thinks part of the character's strength is his mystery: "I don't think anybody would want to know about his private life basically … Can you imagine Frank having this aged mother he goes to visit, and he's got this dreary girlfriend who sits there waiting for him to come home?" 

He talks nostalgically of days when The Bill would "upset the Police Federation all the time". 

We used to beat people up before we'd even questioned them. I mean, open the door and bash 'em up. They'd go, 'You can't do that. We wouldn't do that.' Bullshit you wouldn't," he says emphatically. 

Ellison has had his own brush with the law, and was actually the suspect in a police line-up in his youth. 

"I was innocent," he says. "But they knew I knew who was guilty, so they were trying to stitch me up so I'd give them information … Nice people, our police. Are they as corrupt in Australia?" 

As for Burnside, he thinks viewers like the fact that he's "not very nice". 

Let's face it, most of the people you see on television are just blank boring - well, they bore the arse off me, anyway. And I suppose if you get a character who's not blank boring he's going to be successful." 

But doesn't Ellison ever wished he'd had a go at more romantic parts? 

I always think romantic leads are a bit drippy myself. I see it and think, 'Oh, 'im, that old queen' … I don't like soapy parts. I get bored. I like hard-hitting actors. I'm not interested in romantic things. As soon as a costume drama comes on - I mean, bloody Jane Austen, you can shove it - I'm off. 

Jane Austen - whoooah! Emma Thompson - whoooah! Quick, get me out. Quick, she's in a bonnet!" 

He may be sick of being asked about Burnside, but the old cop has his good side, he concedes. 

He wasn't dull, anyway. He wasn't a dull character." 

Burnside premieres on the ABC, Friday at 8.30 pm. See preview, page 22. 
 

Back on the Beat 
by Robin Oliver 

From the start, Scotland Yard didn't like The Bill, haughtily insisting the Thames Television advertising campaign for the program's 1984 launch too closely resembled recruitment posters for the Metropolitan Police. The depiction of some of the offers as "liars, cheats and bullies" didn't go down too well, either. 

Pigs will be pigs, but not many actors who set foot in the Sun Hill nick matched Christopher Ellison's performance as Frank Burnside. The Bill, to many viewers, was Burnside. Episodes without him seemed tepid, even though the program's 8pm timeslot in Britain precluded extreme violence (it could be implied, but not filmed). 

When Ellison left the cast in 1993 (Burnside was supposedly posted to Northern Ireland on special duties) an essential ingredient of The Bill went with him. Fans were hardly placated when he turned up in Ellington, taking the title role in that failed series about a shady, fast-talking sports agent, a fixer who managed promising players in a number of fields. 

He looked like Burnside, he talked like Burnside and some of his dialogue was almost interchangeable with that of a character who would not go away: Ellison had become typecast. When Yorkshire Television cancelled the series he gave the image a shake by taking a guest role in the sitcom Birds of a Feather. 

After five years, The Bill was still bleeding from its loss and an elaborate plot was devised to return its best detective for guest spots. Burnside was discovered and duly arrested working undercover in Manchester. His Sun Hill mates believed he had turned crooked. 

Now Ellison makes a wonderful entrance in Burnside, a bright new series set, for the opening story, in the seaside resort of Margate. He has been hand-picked to head a select team of detectives for the National Crime Squad, but this is the same unorthodox, sexist, no-nonsense bully boy as before and his reputation has preceded him. 

This two-part episode has to overcome cliché. Burnside must establish himself with his young colleagues, Detective Sergeant Dave Summers (Justin Pierre) and, particularly, Detective Constable Sam Phillips (Zoe Eeles), who mistrusts her new boss. As you might expect, rough charm and a wise head gradually conquer all and the stories should settle after this. But that entrance aboard a cross-Channel ferry will bring a smile to every Burnside supporter's face. 

© 2001, John Fairfax Publications Pty Ltd

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