Mr Harvey Lights a Candle
Timothy Spall plays Mr Harvey
Timothy Spall is wearing a brown tweed jacket, with a brown v-neck jumper, brown shoes and light-brown button-down shirt. At his neck is a brown knitted tie.
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He's wearing a pair of spectacles and his usually unruly mop of brown hair is now slicked down with a neat side-parting.
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Timothy Spall is Mr Harvey – the eponymous teacher at the heart of award-winning writer Rhidian Brooks/³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ ONE's Easter Monday drama.
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And he's a man about to undertake a very important journey.
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As one of three teachers taking their students on a school trip, Mr Harvey is heading for the glorious destination of Salisbury Cathedral.
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Unfortunately, getting there will be one of the toughest journeys he's faced for the past 20 years.
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Not just because he's sharing the trip with a coach load of pubescent teenagers – all with their own prejudices and insecurities - nor because of engine trouble, enforcing an impromptu stop off at the motorway services, or even because his wallet suddenly and mysteriously disappears and with it a photograph which has great meaning to him.
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Mr Harvey has a secret which he has kept for years and he's about to reveal it to his colleagues and the kids.
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"It's a fantastic story," says Tim Spall. "It's about a man shedding his unhappiness by finally coming to terms with the reason for it.
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"Like a lot of people who have experienced a tragedy in their lives and then have been unable to let it go, he's trapped by the events of the past and he's almost built his personality around his misery and his secret.
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"He's a very good teacher of a subject that no-one cares about, but the kids do have a sneaky respect. They think he's a bore but they know he's no pushover.
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"Because he's chosen a life of solitude and he's got this carapace around him, he spends most of his time with the kids, so in a weird way the only people he can confess to is them.
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"In a witty way it is a redemption story. Through circumstance and through allowing himself to connect as a human being with the kids he's been teaching all his life, he finds an escape.
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"In the end it's the two most incongruous characters who you really don't expect to help each other - Mr Harvey and Helen – who do.
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"The main story is about the personal journeys that Mr Harvey and some of the kids go on but it's so clever, subtle and witty that talking about it as one thing limits it and does it a disservice.
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"It touches so many things on so many levels and brings them together.
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"It's also an exploration of a faithless society. These kids on the whole don't have any religion but that doesn't mean they don't have the potential for kindness and spirituality, but it doesn't have to be about religion.
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"It's about getting in touch with something that doesn't have a price tag on it."
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In the drama, the kids suddenly see Mr Harvey as a person outside the classroom, something which he can relate to.
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"As you get older you look back and think how old teachers seemed to you.
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"It was only really when I got to the sixth form that I started to realise they were people rather than figures of authority. I went from feeling that teachers were the enemy to making friends with a few.
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"It happens to the kids in this, they see that the most boring teacher at the school has actually got this huge and interesting and touching story.
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"Nothing dramatic like that happened to me but I remember thinking 'Good God, these are people' and then I started calling them by their first names – well it was the Seventies!" he chuckles.
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"I was lucky as I went to a South London comprehensive but there were two or three teachers who were really kind enough to take me on as a person.
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"In particular, my drama teacher encouraged me to become an actor. That's what I needed to hear. Then she told me how I could do it and I did it."
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Asked about his own memories of school trips Spall says: "Everyone's been on those school trips and everybody groans and thinks they don't want to go and then they all usually have a good time. I'm no different."
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However his most lasting memory of a school trip is a little less fond.
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"I was ten years old and on a school journey, I can't remember where we were going but I was being flippant and there was a teacher who I liked a lot and he clumped me round the earhole.
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"I remember how hurt and disappointed I was that this person I'd looked up to had hit me. Of course that wouldn't happen now," he laughs.
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And for Tim Spall, the filming gave him a welcome chance to see Salisbury Cathedral.
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"It's one of the biggest stars in the piece," he says in all seriousness.
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"I'd never been there before and it was a delight to be there for a week and step in there every day. It is man's expression of how important he thought religion was to him.
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"These old cathedrals represent this amazing day to day belief in God. It's a different mindset from today."
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