What’s On TV: Robson Green dazzling in Grantchester

Sunday night drama stalwart “Grantchester” has just completed another series with the usual focus on the messy private life of Detective Inspector Geordie Keating. Robson Green’s character had been playing away, with about as much success as his beloved Newcastle United.

Green’s love life away from the film set has also been rather turbulent, to say the least.  Oscar Wilde once wrote that “life imitates art” and Robson Golightly Green has done his best over the years to match some of the more complicated story lines from his long list of drama credits.

The son of a coal miner, Green grew up in a small mining village in Northumberland.  He left school at 17 and after three years working as a trainee draughtsman at shipbuilders Swan Hunter, realised that acting was the career for him. Various stage roles followed before his first big break and the role of hospital porter Jimmy in “Casualty”.

In 1991 he married for the first time, having spent two years as Fusilier Dave Tucker in the drama “Soldier Soldier”.  Like his character in the ITV show, Green had an unhappy marriage, which ended in separation and a messy break-up.  Green had conducted a four-year affair with PR executive Pam McDonald which was exposed in a national newspaper in 1999.  That was in addition to a brief fling with Jenni White, an extra in Soldier Soldier.  Do you see a pattern emerging? Green left Soldier Soldier when he became an unlikely pop star, in partnership with his on-screen pal Jerome Flynn. They enjoyed massive success with their version of “Unchained Melody”, which stayed at number one in the singles chart for seven weeks.

While recording Unchained Melody, Green was introduced to Page Three model Vanya Seager, who was then dating Simon Cowell.  Green managed to lure her away from the pop mogul. She became pregnant and they married in 2001.  Given his track record, taking on a part as a man who experiments with wife-swapping to save his crumbling marriage would seem to be a crazy risk.  Green’s role in the racy ITV drama “Take Me” proved no obstacle, although the marriage did eventually break down.  The couple divorced in 2013.

After a number of small parts Green then landed the part of Geordie Keating.  Set in the sleepy village of Grantchester, DI Keating teams up with the local vicar to form an ace crime-fighting duo, while at the same time battling to resist the feminine wiles of one of the station typists.   His on-screen relationship with clergyman Sidney Chambers was tested as the extra-marital relationship became public knowledge.

Away from the set, his tendency to mirror his on-screen behaviour re-surfaced, as he hooked up with a BA hostess and a marketing director. With delightful irony, Green then fell for Zoila Short who was, wait for it, married to a clergyman. Rev Short has publicly forgiven Green for stealing his wife but it’s a fair bet that he does not tune in to Grantchester on a Sunday night.

 

By Ian Hine

 

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