Patrick Robinson interview: 'I’m glad they didn’t ask Idris Elba to play this part'

If you want a snapshot of the prevailing culture in Britain 25 years ago, you could do a lot worse than talk to Patrick Robinson. In the early Nineties, his career was flying. A veteran of four seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the actor had turned himself into a household name – or a household face, at least – via the hospital drama Casualty, when that series was at its zenith, pulling in 17 million viewers a week.

People may have shouted out “Ash” (he played staff nurse Martin “Ash” Ashford) rather than “Patrick” when they saw him on the street, but it was still the sort of high-profile role that hundreds of his contemporaries would have killed for. The fact it didn’t lead to more prestigious parts in TV or film speaks volumes about the attitudes that dominated within the television industry in Nineties Britain.

“Lots of producers were putting projects forward with me in a leading role,” Robinson says when we talk over Zoom on a Friday morning in late May. “Nine times out of 10, the powers-that-be said no. They loved the idea, I was always told, but the producer would explain that ‘They didn’t feel they could go that way.’

“We’re talking ITV, the BBC at times… I learnt that I’d always be seen as ‘black’ before ‘actor’. You have to fit into people’s boxes and I don’t.”

Instead, after playing Ash for six years, Robinson returned to the theatre, making occasional supporting appearances on television and film (notably opposite Alan Davies in the  short-lived BBC romcom A Many Splintered Thing) before moving to America to get the leading roles he had been denied in the UK.

Such a strategy worked – famously – for Idris Elba, who owes his career today to his breakout part in HBO’s The Wire, but Robinson found life in Los Angeles a struggle.

“I went to meet a couple of managers and agents at the end of pilot season, and you had to hang out there. It was one of the loneliest places in the world. I thought: I don’t need this. I’d rather get a buzz from theatre in the UK.”

After that came a three-year stretch on The Bill and more stage work – including in the West End transfer of War Horse and Banquo in Rufus Norris’s touring production of Macbeth – before he returned to Casualty in 2013 and starred in that year’s series of Strictly Come Dancing (he was knocked out in the semi-finals).

Robinson, though, is not so much angry about the prejudice he believes he has faced as disappointed. “That’s the business,” he says with a shrug.

Happily, the actor has finally got that TV leading role he deserves. In BBC One’s Sitting in Limbo, he plays Anthony Bryan, a real-life victim of the Windrush Scandal, which saw thousands of British Caribbeans threatened with deportation as part of a government crackdown on immigration.

Having come over on his older brother’s passport at the age of eight, Bryan had lived in the UK for 50 years when, in 2015, he applied for his first passport to visit his ailing mother in Jamaica. Despite attending primary and secondary schools in London and paying taxes over decades of regular employment as a painter-decorator, Bryan was classified as an illegal immigrant, laid off at work and left unable to claim benefits.

Establishing his British citizenship to the satisfaction of an Immigration Office seemingly working on the presumption of guilt proved nightmarishly hard: his birth certificate and mother’s original passport had been misplaced during house moves, records of school attendance destroyed.

“The details were shocking,” says Robinson. “The bureaucracy was unbelievable. You don’t see the same caseworker, so you’re going back to the start so many times. That frustration, those hoops you have to jump through until you just give up and say: ‘Take me back.’”

Bryan was arrested twice and had two spells in detention centres totalling five weeks, with financial hardship eventually forcing him and his partner Janet (played in the drama by Nadine Marshall) to move in with their daughter. A caseworker referred to Bryan’s “alleged children” and testimony from “a man you claim is your old headmaster”. His deportation was only thwarted thanks to a growing wave of publicity, the intervention of his MP and the expensively acquired services of solicitors – not to mention the astounding resilience of Bryan and his family (Sitting in Limbo has been written by his younger brother, novelist Stephen S Thompson).

Robinson, who met Bryan as part of his preparation for the drama, was deeply impressed by his alter ego, who, at 62, is is six years his senior.

“He was so cool, dignified, assured, measured – he doesn’t seem bitter about his experiences. He reminds me of one of my elder brothers [Robinson is the fifth of seven children] who was always giving me life philosophies. I looked up to him; he made sure I stayed on the straight and narrow.”

Robinson’s parents travelled over from Jamaica in the Sixties. While his mother left the family when Robinson was nine, his father worked as an electrician and bus conductor and is now in his 80s.

“I have so much respect for him dealing with Britain in those days,” says Robinson. “My father and I are not that close – my childhood was all about doing as you were told and not getting into trouble, so you’d only get a chat if you did something wrong. But when I did the voice-over for a [documentary about Windrush], Dad became my Bible for those stories. I was in tears the whole time I worked on it.”

Robinson, born and raised in the UK, still questions his own identity. “I’m not in the club, so I have to have a thicker skin. My strange displacement is to be English, British, West Indian and Jamaican.”

For the purposes of Sitting in Limbo, Robinson is Jamaican – a quality he deems essential to playing Bryan. “I know that world, I appreciate it and I’m still involved in it. I was really keen they didn’t get someone like Idris Elba. No disrespect to him, but he’s Nigerian. He may be in tune with the West Indian world and he could do it I’m sure, but there’s a past that I have.”

In March, shortly before deportations were paused owing to Covid-19, the independent Lessons Learned report was released. It excoriated the Home Office’s “ignorance and thoughtlessness” and recommended a full review of the “hostile environment” immigration policy that had led to over 850 of the Windrush generation being wrongly detained, 83 getting wrongly deported and at least 13 dying before the errors were acknowledged.

With many having faced dire financial hardship, only 36 of 1,108 applicants for compensation have so far received reparations. Bryan is not among them.

When I broach the subject of government apologies, Robinson finally shows a flash of anger.

“Apologies tell me you acknowledge something but you’re not going to change anything,” he says. “Until these career politicians put their hands in their pockets, they can shove their apologies up their a---s.”

Sitting in Limbo is on BBC One tonight, Monday 8 June, at 8.30pm