Bill's dark side

He stars as Dr Douglas Monaghan, who heads up the fictional Parapsychology Unit at Clyde University which provides the starting point for stories of the paranormal.

His team will be investigating everything from voodoo to cult rituals, from past life experiences to telepathic twins in three two-part stories.

Paterson says he's never been drawn to the dark side. "I'm open enough, but I'm not one of nature's fantasists. I'm not a paranormal person," he says.

"I'm much more interested in the practical, the hands-on and the factual than in the metaphysical. But that has helped me to play Monaghan, who may be an expert, but also has doubts and concerns. He's not some sort of loopy mystic."

Monaghan is described as the consummate professional, the safe pair of hands when life slips from the norm into the nightmare. Paterson likes him, and believes he's different to other characters played by actors like him.

"At my age, there's the danger of that clich of the slightly crumpled and rumpled man being a bit grumpy going through life, and four divorces later, a tendency to hit the bottle," he says.

"Monaghan is not like that. I can understand his life. He has lost his wife and child, and that has left him scarred. This is a major back-story, a very powerful thing.

"I like this company. He's not unlike me. He's a bit of a technophobe, not very good with machinery. We don't see much of his home arrangements, but I think he's probably a bit lonely. Although they do keep bringing in these lovely ladies who come to me with their problems."

The actor does admit to the odd bit of superstition. "I do have attitudes to places, and think that inanimate things have a life. I even talked to the little trailer I was in while we were filming. It's as though it's known me for quite some time now and has a life. We affect each other," he says.

"I also have this superstition never to do things in the same order when I appear on stage. I know lots of actors who have the opposite superstition - they have to do things in the same order. I make sure I never do."

He reveals that he once had an alarming premonition, which he dismisses now as an odd coincidence. It concerned actor Alex Norton, with whom he's worked with many times on stage from the late 1960s onwards.

"I had this strong feeling that he'd been involved in an accident with the wheel falling off his car - and discovered that the wheel had fallen off his car at exactly the moment I had dreamed about it. Luckily, he wasn't injured."

He also admits to what he describes as a "beyond the norm" relationship with his wife, theatre designer Hildegard Bechtier. They're always thinking of exactly the same thing at exactly the same time, or trying to ring each other at the same time. "It's almost embarrassing," he says.

"I know that many people experience something like that, and the temptation is to no longer believe it's just coincidence, but that something else is going on.

"Maybe we all used to have this sense of awareness and modern life has pushed it away. Then there's the absence of the power of formal religion in our culture.

"Add to that the fact that we have more leisure time to explore the internal, we are not so caught up in the daily grind, so now we are seeking spiritual and psychic support."

The three stories in the series deal with subjects he reckons that, for most people without any real knowledge of the paranormal, are the ones that most intrigue them - reincarnation, identical twins, and voodoo.

"These things are not science fiction, they are quite down-to-earth paranormal experiences," says Paterson.

"The strength of the series is that we keep within the realms of an academic investigation. We are led by accident, but inexorably towards being caught up in dangerous and deadly deeds. We are not pushing them. I feel it's closer to Tales Of The Unexpected by Roald Dahl than The X Files. It's much more human and ordinary, and that makes it more disturbing."

His research for the series led him to the Internet, although nothing too deep as he didn't want Monaghan overburdened with too much jargon.

"I want it to feel truthful, so that if the filming was stopped at any point and someone asked me, 'what are you talking about here?, why are you doing that?', I would like to have an answer. That's my criteria on research. I don't want people to think, 'isn't he a clever bugger?'.

"But Sea Of Souls does pose lots of really important questions, and I think viewers are going to be caught up in the debate about just what is true and what's in the mind."

* Sea Of Souls is on BBC1 on Monday and Tuesday at 9pm.

Published: ??/??/2003