That Corrie kiss ensured Bruno Langley's career took off. Now the former soap star is keen to break into stage-acting and talks to Viv Hardwick about his decision to play another gay character in a revival of A Taste Of Honey.

Bruno Langley may not be batting for the right side, according to a recent copy of the gay AXM Magazine, but the former soap star has had to cope with enormous interest in his sexuality after he made history by being responsible for Coronation Street's first guy-onguy kiss. His appearance as Corrie's eye -opening on-screen gay Todd Grimshaw produced nominations, awards and a massive fan club in a certain part of the community. So it was surprising to read that he was looking to play down the interest in his gay storylines after agreeing to star as a character with 'confused sexuality' in a touring stage revival of A Taste Of Honey.

Surely he was offered the role of Geoffrey in the award-winning creation by 19 -year-old Shelagh Delaney, which led to the memorable 1961 film, as a result of playing Todd for three years and snogging Adam Rickitt's character Nick?

"I didn't audition for the role, we just sort of had a meeting, but I guess they felt I could pull this off. So I'm quite flattered they thought that straight away," he replies.

"I might well be worried if this was another soap, watched by ten million people, but although some of the dialogue is quite soapy, at the end of the day it's theatre and I haven't done a great deal of theatre. I found this play too good to turn down really," Langley adds.

"I still have a Corrie fan club surviving today, it was kind of inevitable when you played this kind of role on a high profile show. I kind of knew this might happen. I cope with all the attention by comparing it with the knowledge that people elsewhere are starving and others have diseases... so what am I whining about. I always try to put things in perspective. It's hard to cope when a Chav walks up to you in the street and shouts 'are you gay or what?' but why should you give them an answer if they ask like that?" he says.

Of switching from openly gay Todd to closet gay Geoffrey, who agrees to live with a girl made pregnant by a black sailor so both can escape problems, he explains: "I think deep down he knows he's gay but he either can't admit it or doesn't want to be what he is and that's where the friction of the character is. I've done it for TV so I thought I'd do it for theatre, might as well give it go."

Having been a rare soap regular to leave Wetherfield on the bus - "most depart in the taxi" he jokes - Langley played the role of Adam Mitchell in the Dalek two-parter in last year's Doctor Who with Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper. A couple of theatre parts led to the offer of the major national tour which comes to Darlington's Civic Theatre next week.

Of the difficult decision he made to leave Corrie in 2004, the actor says: "Once you've done such a high profile job you don't get offered, unless you're Ray Winstone, leads in dramas, you have to work for them. I think if I do my time in theatre then people are going to take me a bit more seriously than if I'd just left a soap." He's intrigued how audiences in the south will react to A Taste Of Honey which is set in Salford and features Samantha Robinson as Jo who has to cope with a boozy, irresponsible mother, played by former Emmerdale actress Samantha Giles.

"I've noticed that the audiences are a little older where we opened at the Coliseum, Oldham, mainly because I think the subject matter appeals to people who remember those days," he says, adding that onlookers certainly laugh in all the right places which means the working class comedy-drama has lost none of its impact after nearly 50 years. "The play is ancient folklore to someone born in 1983 like me, but my dad's 61 so he's given me a few tips about life in the late 1950s. I remember as a kid you just had four TV channels and if you were lucky you'd see a dirty scene right near the credits but now you can see everything you want.

@But I think a lot of the points are still relevant today," says the actor who admits he's seeking a bit more normality in his own life.

"Being nominated for Most Popular Actor at the TV awards, career-wise was brilliant for me...but if I thought I stood a chance of winning then I might have been upset when I didn't. To have that at 21 was incredible. I have to be honest, I wasn't aware of the interest that would be created by the first bloke-on-blokes kiss on Corrie. I was visiting my parents and I got a phone call saying 'there's going to be a few things in the papers' and it was all over the front pages and then it kind of hit me," comments Langley, who quips that the publicity probably helped rather than hindered his own lovelife.

He also claims that someone straight playing gay certainly doesn't get the same amount of stick as Corrie's gay actor Antony Cotton playing camp Sean Tully.

"Being outrageously camp is what most people think that being gay is all about," he says.

© The Northern Echo, 18/5/06

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