From Strictly to strict sir

LAST year, his life was taken over by sequins, hairspray and spray tan. This year for Tom Chambers has been strictly school as he joins the cast of Waterloo Road.

He left BBC1’s hospital drama Holby City and danced his way through Strictly Come Dancing to emerge, with professional partner Camilla Dallerup, as the 2008 Strictly champion.

In school drama Waterloo Road, he plays executive headteacher Max Tyler, brought in to oversee the merger of Waterloo Road and John Fosters, a local private school.

He has very strong ideas on how the new-look school is going to operate.

“He’s a man on a mission – to stamp out disobedience and improve academic results.

He’s passionate and explosive when it comes to the control and discipline that he desires.

“His desires also tend to lead him towards the female staff where he either ends up manipulating them or threatening them to his advantage. He wants to be top of an empire, the Max Tyler Empire.”

From the word go, there’s a strong connection between strict disciplinarian Max and head of pastoral care Kim Campbell, played by Angela Griffin.

“Max instantly saw Kim as an attractive woman with a strong personality within the school,” says Chambers.

“He had instant chemistry and desire for her, as well as knowing that if he quickly got her on his side as an ally, he could use her to his advantage when making changes within the school’s policies.”

If he was a teacher himself, Chambers would like to teach not performing arts, but science. He was never interested at school, but now finds science and how things react with each other fascinating.

The series is filmed in Rochdale, meaning the actor had to relocate for three months to Manchester. He liked the city, but wasn’t so sure about the weather.

“Manchester is a great city, I loved it.

Full of character, buzzing and vibrant.

But it’s true when they say that it rains every day. It’s the wrong side of the Pennines, and filming was always being interrupted because of impromptu downpours.”

Now living in London with his wife, Clare, he was brought up in Derbyshire and still thinks of himself as a country boy rather than a city boy.

“I love going back home, putting wellies on and going for long walks or bike-riding down steep hills,” he says.

“That said, London is the gateway to art and you’ve got all the theatres on your doorstep so I try to do both as much as possible, and some views along the Thames are stunning.”

WHEN we left spy thriller Spooks, boss Harry was being flung into a car boot in one of the show’s traditional cliffhangers. The eighth series of the Bafta Award-winning series takes up the story as the Spooks team attempt to rescue him from his Russian captors.

It appears their worst fears are confirmed when footage of his killing is posted on the internet by the Sacred Army of Righteous Vengeance, or Sarv for short.

However, Ros refuses to believe Harry is dead and leads Lucas and the others on a mission to find him. Help arrives from an unexpected source when former team member Ruth Evershed returns to the grid, fearing for her life.

LAST year’s series of The Family hardly set the TV schedules alight, but, undeterred, C4 puts another family – British Asians the Grewals – firmly in the spotlight.

In the opening episode, eldest son Sunny’s wedding to fiancee Shay is fast approaching, but what should be a joyous occasion is slightly overshadowed by Shay’s difficult relationship with her own family. They don’t approve of her marriage to Sunny and her efforts to patch things up have so far proved unsuccessful.

As Shay reaches out to her family to be at her side on what is supposed to be the happiest day of her life, will her dreams of a tearful reunion become a reality?