Nick swaps Street for stage

It's difficult to work out where Andy MacDonald, the TV Soap character from Coronation Street ends, and actor Nick Cochrane begins.

Perhaps that's because he has been playing the role in the Street since the tender age of 15 when he was 'discovered' in a school play.

Nick, now 25, is taking time out from the Street for a while to star in a new production of Bill Naughton's play Spring and Port Wine, which opens at the Oxford Apollo tonight.

Apart from playing a Prince in a Christmas panto last year, all Nick's acting experience has been on the telly in Coronation Street, where he arrived along with the rest of the McDonald family, in 1989.

"I hadn't thought of being an actor, didn't know what I wanted to be," he recalls. "Then we did this play at my school in Manchester. Someone said that a woman from Granada Television was there, looking for talent. But you don't think anything of that do you?" But 15-year-old Nick was called to an interview at Granada, along with fellow pupil Simon Gregson.

Nick still didn't think he would be in with a chance of TV stardom.

"They gave us this interview, took down the colour of our eyes that sort of thing. But even that didn't mean much.

"They were looking for twin boys for a role in Coronation Street - and I'm a year older than Simon and we don't look much alike."

But the casting director for the Street thought otherwise - and both boys were chosen. And so his career in television began.

Nick continued juggling his new life on the street with school for another year, and despite his changed lifestyle managed to pass all his GCSEs.

Nick remembers the television people telling him that his role in the Street would change his life.

"I didn't believe them," he says. "Anyway, all these people rushing up to say 'hello' and ask for my autograph, well I quite liked it at first."

These days he is not so sure.

Like many actors who are constantly having their privacy interrupted when they are eating out, or simply walking down the street, he's beginning to find all the attention a bit invasive. He sees his role in Coronation Street as a nine-to-five job. In fact he reckons it's nothing very special at all.

" I get up and am on the road for the studio by half past eight. We work right though the day, just like other people do, and if we are lucky get some time off in the evening.

"I do that right through the week, often working Sundays too - that's the day we usually do the location shots."

"But there's nothing nine-to-five about the theatre," he adds.

Spring and Port Wine is set in the spring of 1965, when rebellion breaks out in the Crompton household because the youngest daughter Hilda, played by Samantha Howard, refuses to eat her tea-time herring. Her father orders it to be served up at each meal until she eats it. But Nick (who plays her big brother Wilf) comes to her aid and secretly disposes of the offending fish.

"It's a good English comedy. You can really get into it and let yourself go," he said.

Nick says that there were comic moments on the Street too - but most of them happened behind the scenes.

"I remember this time when we were filming one of those typical McDonald fights. I was the one that was going to get it, so they made me up like mad, loads of blood, black-eye, the lot.

"So covered in all this, I rushed up to the door, which was supposed to open, with Jim standing the other side. Of course it didn't open," said Nick who ended smashing headlong into the door.

"The blood that poured out of my nose where I had bashed it looked so good I insisted that we shoot the scene there and then. I was never going to get a more realistic nose bleed, was I?" he said.

The question all his fans are asking is will he return to the Street?

At the moment he thinks he will, but he admits that he is being seduced by live theatre.

"There's something rather satisfying about the sound of applause," he said.

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