JASPER Britton jokes that Henry IV is one of the great thankless roles of Shakespeare. “it’s like Antonio in the Merchant Of Venice. He gets the title role but he’s not exactly the star of the show,” says Britton who reveals that he’s a “king” who has to share a dressing room “do up my own shoes and wipe my own bum... it’s really not what I was expecting”.

As the son of 90-year-old sitcom star Tony Britton, and full of witty stories, Jasper bemoans the fact that his monarch has hardly a shred of comic opportunity in the long speeches of Henry IV Pts 1 and 2. “At the beginning I thought I’d go straight for the tragedy, the serious stuff, but actually the audience has taught me there are a few amusing moments. It took me by surprise when they chuckled at one of my lines concerning Prince Hal,” he says.

That was a gift of an entry to seeking stories about his life with dad Tony. At 52, Jasper reveals that at lunch in Stratford dad told him: “It’s strange not to see you as a 17-year-old. I said, ‘Do you know how old I am and realise how long it’s been since I was l7’? It was like he hadn’t seen me since.”

The two have never acted on stage together but did star in North Yorkshire-set TV series The Royal and short-lived sitcom My Dad’s The Prime Minister.

“In The Royal he played a man who married an extraordinarily glamorous girl and his character has taken too much Vitamin A in case he couldn’t get it up. That had made him ill and he then falls down a manhole cover.

During the shoot I took him out to dinner at a Thai restaurant and I didn’t know he disliked spicy food. Instead, he just drank an enormous amount and ended up staggering back to his hotel. The last thing I remember is saying, ‘You’ll be all right and go straight to bed?’. The next time I saw him he had a massive cut on his forehead after falling over and smashing his head on the bedside table. “The next day he had to lie in bed with a head injury because he’d fallen down a manhole. He had one of the worst hangovers in history and literally fell asleep all day. The directory kept saying, ‘Don’t wake Tony, don’t wake Tony, just bring the camera in’. Then they’d go, ‘Just doing a take’ and he’d go ‘hmm, hmm, hmm’ as if he was method acting.”

In the Ian Hislop-created My Dad’s the Prime Minister, Tony was an old actor playing Father Christmas at British Home Stores in Oxford Street. Jasper reveals that Tony ended up using an unsavoury caravan the BBC had hired.

“This caravan stank and the BBC parked it in a studio which was hot and made the smell even worse. We had to spend the whole afternoon in there trying not to laugh because nobody could work out what the smell was.

That, so far, are the only times we’ve worked together. Mind you, he’s still only 90, but those are our only gigs together.”

However, Jasper does credit dad with inspiring him to take up acting in the first place. Tony used to give Jasper his old scripts to take to school so that he could use the back to write or draw on. “I took one to school with me because I wasn’t particularly academic and it was a history lesson. I started to read the script and it was No, No Nanette, a 1973 musical he did at Drury Lane. The first song was called Too Many Rings Around Rosie and as I read the song lyrics in block capitals, and had seen it and had a bit of a crush on the girl singing the song (Anne Rogers), it hit me like a blinding flash that somebody sent you this and you go somewhere and practice it until it’s good enough to show to people and you work with people like Anne Rogers,” says Jasper, who, until then, had only considered the idea of being a bank manager, a train driver or a fireman.

On the subject of playing a king, Jasper admits he often doesn’t know what he’s going to do next and a few years ago went back to being a motorcycle despatch rider.

“I was sent to Stevenage from London in a blizzard and I was sitting on my bike on the A1 and thinking, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to make it’. I had to pull over and ring up to say there was two inches of snow, but managed to get through to drop off some drugs at the hospital,” he says.

On the way back, Jasper received a phone call from Tamara Harvey offering him a role in the film Anonymous, which was about Shakespeare’s Plays and being shot in Berlin using a specially-built replica of The Globe.

“She said did I want to be in Shakespeare’s original company in a massive movie and I replied, ‘That sounds good, when do I start?’”

Back on the acting balancing act, Jasper isn’t sure if Parts 1 and 2 are among Shakespeare’s finest works, but is sure is that they do touch people.

It’s been ten years since Jasper was in a touring RSC company at Newcastle, but recently returned to the North-East to join the four-hander cast in Northern Stage’s Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf ? directed by Erica Whyman, who is now deputy artistic director at the Royal Shakespeare Company.

“After three weeks rehearsal I knew I was in trouble because it was such a beast of a play that I didn’t know the script, but it all worked out. Even the proper actors struggled with that play.”

  • The RSC season appears at Newcastle Theatre Royal from September 25 to October 11. Henry IV Part I runs Sep 25 to Oct 4, 7.30pm (matinees Sep 27 and Oct 2 & 4, 1.30pm), Henry IV Part II Sep 26 to Oct 4, 7.30pm and The Two Gentlemen of Verona runs Oct 7 to 11, 7.30pm (matinees Oct 9 & 11, 1.30pm). Tickets from £13. Theatre Royal Box Office: 08448-11 21-21 or book online at theatreroyal.co.uk