Interview with Bernard Hill

Tell us about your character.

I play Samuel, the oldest member of the family. He’s been making sweets for a living for years and years and years. He started off with a barrel in Stockport market selling sweets and all that kind of stuff, and I suppose it’s a story of a self-made man in that post-war environment. He was an emergency ambulance driver in the war, in the Manchester blitz, so he was of a certain age at that time. He’s been around for quite a long time, and gone through quite a lot really – kind of the resurrection of England after the Second World War.

How does the bombing affect Samuel and his feelings towards his family?

I think Samuel says he sees how it looks on the other side, but I don’t think it really changes him very much. Maybe he becomes a little bit more tolerant because just after that, the younger members of the family - the tribe if you like - start to take over the business, and he kind of allows that. So maybe it’s that he condones the shift in emphasis. I think it affects Daniel in two ways, because the new ones are taking over with Samuel’s blessing, but not necessarily with Daniel’s blessing. It’s not an obvious transition for Daniel, whereas with Samuel I think it is, and maybe the effect of the bomb orchestrates that.

As Samuel says in the scripts – “Families have stories; it’s what holds them together. They don’t have to be true necessarily, that’s just how things are.” And if you look at most families, that’s true.