Profiles

"I don't get to Barnsley too often nowadays, my work's down here of course and the majority of my relatives have moved and are no longer living there, so I get home occasionally. I'm coming home and getting a degree up there in April time, so I'm coming up there to spend some time.

"I shall also be coming up in the early new year, 'cause I'm writing my autobiography so I need to actually go back to Cudworth and Shafton and places like that to re-visit the haunts of my youth [laughs], in the company hopefully of one or two mates of my youth.

"That should be interesting 'cause I've not been back for a long time and writing about growing up in Barnsley and Cudworth will be interesting.

"I had a very, very happy childhood, I only remember with a smile my childhood in Cudworth. I was brought up in a very close mining community and I can always remember being happy, and that's the wonderful thing.

"That programme... Who Do You Think You Are, they came to me a while ago and said 'we'd like to do you'. I said you won't find anything in my background that you'll find vaguely interesting. All my family were dead straight, didn't go to prison and all were miners [laughs], it's very simple, and miners didn't have any social life, they spent too much time underground.

"They came back after three weeks and said 'you're right, we cant find anything interesting [laughs], go away you're a very boring man'.

"But I shall look forward to it, I only look back on my time with Barnsley with huge love and affection, I had a wonderful time there. I still get it when I go back there, it's very easy, it's like putting on an old overcoat. You slip back into the language and the humour of the people and you feel it very strongly.

"A Yorkshire upbringing is very evocative, a South Yorkshire upbringing particularly, it's very strong, it lingers on you. Even if you wanted to get rid of it, which I don't, you couldn't.

"I didn't realise until my mother died recently, she was 95, and she started a book on her life which I didn't know about. I'd started reading after she died, and I never realised how poor we were because they protected you from it, but also the pit that closed itself around you in times of need.

"They were very good at protecting and sheltering their own... but it was a tough time for them, but I was blissfully unaware of that I just rode my bike around Barnsley and Cudworth thinking I was Humphrey Bogart."