Drinking Penguin Back before a radiation leak wiped out the crew of Red Dwarf, Dave Lister had a gang of regular drinking buddies. One of them, Selby, was played by former Eastender David Gillespie - and, as he reveals to Mr Flibble, there may not have been all that much acting involved...

2 March, 2001

There's not a lot of room for inhibition in Operation Good Guys - your character, DCI Beech, tends to end up fairly humiliated...

I suppose so. My wife's a psychologist and she reckons I've got this frontal lobe syndrome where I'm uninhibited. It's not the case at all. I get very embarrassed and very shy about all this stuff. But, okay, I'm not a Chippendale, I am overweight - and you do go onto the set thinking, 'You said to yourself three months ago, get down the bloody gym. And you didn't, you went to the pub instead'. But if the scenes are going to work you've got to take you knickers off and throw them in the air - as hard as that is.

Beech does go mad a lot - or gets drugged, or hypnotised...

Beech is continually having breakdowns, I think. Whether it's going loony on a desert island or the pressure of work getting to him. It's great fun to do things like that! He goes through all these things, and it's an actor's dream to get up in the morning and think, 'What am I doing today? I can't wait to get in there and find out'. No lines to learn, no lines to forget...

More David Gillespie on...

• Interview
• Starting Out
• Losing Inhibition
• Top Tens
• Biography

Right hand provided by Andrew Ellard