Ricky Tomlinson
Eric Tomlinson, who has always worked as Ricky, arrived on British television as an adult with a life already behind him and never bothered to disguise it. The Liverpool accent, the bulk, the flat unhurried delivery: they were the act and also simply him. Brookside made him Bobby Grant, a trade unionist in a soap that took working-class Britain seriously, and that set the shape of everything after it.
He is very good at one difficult thing, which is playing men who are idle, rude or defeated and making an audience like them anyway. Jim Royle in The Royle Family is the definitive version. The series is built almost entirely from one sofa, one room and something close to real time, with no plots to speak of, so the comedy has to arrive purely in the timing of a man not doing very much. Tomlinson's engine there is contempt for whatever is on the television, and it is funnier than any punchline the show writes. He spent years in parallel as DCI Charlie Wise in Cracker, where the same flat register reads as authority rather than comedy.
Ken Loach used him early, as Larry in Riff-Raff, a building-site drama shot with the loose non-professional rhythms that suit him exactly, and he turns up again as himself in a 2026 documentary about Loach. Around that he took the parts a well-liked national fixture gets offered: the title role in the football mockumentary Mike Bassett: England Manager, a mayor in a Christmas comedy, a sorcerer named Moobin in a children's fantasy.
Movies (7)
TV (5)
Where to start with Ricky Tomlinson
Nothing else he has done comes close to The Royle Family, so go there first and stay a while. Let the format explain itself over two or three episodes: one room, one sofa, a family talking over the television. Jim Royle is the role he will be remembered for, and the comedy lives entirely in his refusal to move.
For the other half of him, Cracker uses the same voice as police authority opposite Robbie Coltrane, with no jokes in it at all. Riff-Raff is the essential film, a Ken Loach building-site drama where his ease among non-actors is the whole point, and Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach is the natural chaser.
For the broad stuff, The 51st State is a loud Liverpool crime caper and Nativity! is a Christmas comedy that mostly works. In the Flesh is the odd one out and the most interesting, a small-town drama that takes him entirely seriously.