Middle men

IF there’s one thing that actors are always saying it’s about not wanting to be typecast, but wanting play a variety of roles. Mike Bailey certainly gets the chance in the epic drama 1066: The Battle For Middle Earth, on C4 tonight and tomorrow.

He made his name as Sid, in C4’s awardwinning drama, Skins. That was all sex, drugs and youthful shenanigans. By way of contrast, his latest project deals with war, loyalty and death in 11th Century England.

The two-part series re-imagines the story of the Norman Conquest through the eyes of ordinary men who fought for the land they called “middle earth”.

The idea is to use contemporary insights, sourced from the Domesday Book and other chronicles, to go behind the shield-wall to depict the soldiers and villagers caught up in the chaos.

Narrated by Ian Holm, the episodes follow three ordinary Anglo-Saxons sucked into the brutal wars, with first the Vikings and then the Normans. Their stories are told through the three great confrontations of 1066 – the battles of Hastings, Fulford and Stamford Bridge.

Bailey admits surprise at just how successful Skins was. It came during his first year at college and he felt he learned more doing the TV series than he ever could by going to university.

“From an actor’s point of view, the first job you take needs to set you up and get you a little bit of publicity, and then the second job must be a completely different type of role,” he says.

“I was offered 1066 by someone who worked on Skins, and they sent me the script and I loved it. I knew some of the stuff the director had done before, which he’d won awards for, and I thought the whole project sounded like a lot of fun.”

The idea with 1066 was something told through the eyes of the soldiers; normal people taken away from their homes and security zones and everything they knew.

“They would be enlisted and have to go off to war. So my character, Tofi, doesn’t want to be there. He just wants to get back to his village and his new bride,” he says.

“They put together a 1066 bible for us, which taught us everything we needed to know. I know things like the fact that Vikings judged masculinity by the size of the penis. Things like that.

“And other amazing stuff, like a lot of people would spend their entire lives within a five-mile radius of their own village.

They’d never know anyone who wasn’t from their village. My character has a line where he says it’s the furthest he’s ever gone from his village and it’s about two miles away.”

Dressing up and joining in the battles was brilliant for him. On the first day they were thrown in at the deep end.

“They said, ‘right, there’s a hill, you’ve got to keep running up it again and again’,” he recalls.

“I thought, ‘this isn’t going to be fun’, but it really was. We did four days of filming the Battle of Hastings and we would get really riled up for it. It was like before a rugby match, when the teams chant at each other. We would all have to stand in a line and yell at the other army.

“At the end of it, I was the fittest I’ve ever been in my life. You’d be absolutely shattered at the end of the day, and then to get up at 6am the next day felt completely ridiculous.

“But there wasn’t a point when I didn’t enjoy it. I would have run up that hill as many times as needed.”

The extras in the battle scenes were reenactors from a group called Regia Anglorum.

“They just got really into it, it’s what they love to do,” he says.

“They loved running at each other and beating the c*** out of each other. They spent the day lying around in the rain and none of them moaned. There were over 100 of them, and no one ever moaned.

“The same can’t be said about the actors.

We were all bitching away like anything.”