Set in Newcastle in 1939, Joe Maddison’s War features a shipyard worker who feels past his prime. Needing a new challenge, Joe and his friend, Harry, volunteer for the Home Guard.

NO sooner has Kevin Whately sat down to talk than he’s told to get up because he’s needed elsewhere on the set of Joe Maddison’s War, Alan Plater’s new film for ITV, set in wartime Newcastle.

The actor isn’t called for filming, but to eat his lunch. If he chats now instead of eating, he won’t have time for food before he’s required back on set.

Making a two-hour wartime film in only four weeks on a tight budget is taxing, especially for Whately, who’s worked every day since the shoot began. This is the final week of filming, culminating in a night shoot on the Friday. “They’re getting their final pound of flesh,” he jokes on location at the village hall in Heddonon- the-Wall, outside Newcastle.

So, is it harder work than Lewis, the Inspector Morse spin-off that returns to ITV1 tomorrow? “Yeah, probably, because it’s period,” says Whately, when he’s finally free to talk a few hours later while the next scene is set up. “We get 24 or 25 days on Lewis, and 22 on this. The extra two days would just be nice.”

He’s not moaning, just acknowledging that tight budgets and schedules are the rule in TV programme making these recessionary days. But he’s clearly glad to be making Joe Maddison’s War, not surprising perhaps as Plater wrote the role with him in mind.

He’s joined in the cast by virtually every Geordie actor you can name, including Robson Green as his friend from the trenches and the shipyards.

“Joe Maddison is a First World War vet who’s a little bit damaged by the experiences in the trenches and Robson is his mate, Harry, who was in the trenches with him. They’re both damaged in different ways,” explains Whately.

“And, because they’re in a reserved occupation in the yards, they decide to join the Home Guard. From then on it’s based on Alan Plater’s uncle, who was in the Home Guard in Jarrow and things that happened to him.”

The two-hour film marks the first time he’s worked with Green, although his working relationship with the awardwinning Plater goes back two decades or so, when Whately appeared in a Miss Marple episode written by Plater. These days Plater writes an episode of Lewis each year.

Joe Maddison’s War was written two years ago and taken up by ITV, but filming was delayed because the broadcaster wasn’t commissioning any single films at the time.

He says there was talk of shooting it in Belfast because of the docks. Then regional screen agency Northern Film and Media stepped in with a contribution from their content fund and the whole film was shot in the North-East, part of the resurgence of TV and film production in the region.

FILMING enabled him to work alongside the only person to whom he’s ever written a fan letter – Derek Jacobi. Whately had been offered a part in Hamlet, but wasn’t available.

But he did go to see the production with Jacobi playing the troubled Danish prince.

“It was absolutely fantastic,” recalls Whately, who was so impressed that he wrote and told him how good it was. He was able to remind Jacobi of this when he arrived on the Newcastle set.

The film also sees him working with his actress wife, Madelaine Newton, who plays Jenny the chip shop lady. “My wife and I look after our granddaughter threeand- a-half days a week, so with both of us being in this it’s cost me a fortune in babyminders,” he says.

Joe Maddison’s War marks the first feature film directed by documentary maker Patrick Collerton. Whately worked with him previously when he provided the voiceover for the award-winning The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off.

“He’s absolutely terrific,” he says. “His local knowledge has been really invaluable, having someone from the area means he understands all that Geordie nuances.”

This weekend, Whately returns as Lewis for a fourth series and any doubts that a spin-off series about Morse’s sidekick wouldn’t work have long since vanished.

Filming Lewis keeps the actor busy for six months of the year. Clearly, rumours of the demise of the series have been greatly exaggerated. “This time last year one newspaper story suddenly said Lewis had been dropped. And I thought, ‘they’re still sending the scripts, no one’s told me’,” he says.

The story wasn’t true, not least because the makers know Lewis brings in the pennies with overseas sales, being watched in more than 120 territories.

“Funnily enough it sells more abroad than Inspector Morse, which I find quite extraordinary,” he says.

Whately, who now lives in the country outside London, is enjoying being back filming in the North-East. “It’s great,” he says. “Particularly shooting in places like Beamish, which opened the year I went to drama school and I’ve never been. I’m too tight to pay. I’ve been saying I’ll film there sometime. But it’s taken 30 years.”

How, you wonder, will viewers abroad take to all the North-East accents? He admits that doing something like Lewis, for which overseas sales are important, you start to think about how to pitch the accent, so that people understand you.

“Auf Wiedersehen Pet never sold abroad at all, but I remember people coming over from America and buying Morse and asking what else was good. Someone said Taggart, and they said, ‘we’ve looked at it and don’t understand it’.

“Patrick had to push us, especially after lunch he’d say, ‘your accent’s gone back to being a southerner’.”

■ Lewis: tomorrow, ITV1, 8.30pm.

■ Joe Maddison’s War is scheduled for screening later this year.