WITHOUT wanting to state the obvious, never confuse the actor with the person.

Actors probably get understandably tired of it, but it's easily done.

With TV being such a powerful medium it's not surprising that well-established fictional characters create preconceptions about the actors behind them.

Take Richard Briers. One might think from some of his best known roles - perennial uptight loser Martin in Ever Decreasing Circles, uptight self-sufficiency freak Tom in The Good Life, and the voice of the meek and fearful rabbit, Fiver, in Watership Down - that you might encounter a polite, reserved, slightly wet blanket.

But no, when The Herald contacted him in Malvern where he is on tour with The Tempest, which comes to Guildford's Yvonne Arnaud Theatre next month, he started off tetchily and finished with a flurry of impatient monosyllabic answers.

Maybe it was the thought of a day's worth of the same old questions being asked by a succession of local newspaper journalists; maybe it was his interviewer's lack of appreciation of Shakespeare; or maybe it was annoyance at a question that he thought suggested he had suffered from being typecast.

Whatever it was, he was not in the best of moods.

Asked about his various roles and the difference between playing sitcoms and Shakespeare, the 68-year-old Merton-born actor responded: "It's all acting. I've been an all-rounder. The Tempest is obviously a bit more difficult and demands a lot more from you intellectually, but it's acting and you can either do it or you can't.

"Martin from Ever Decreasing Circles was one of my favourites. I thought he was brilliant and I'm still great friends with Peter Egan. Tom from The Good Life was the closest to what I'm like."

Associating him with rather inoffensive characters, it was tremendous fun to see Richard play a lecherous and conniving old Oxford don in an episode of Inspector Morse a couple of years back.

"I quite enjoyed seeing you in that role," said your reporter, to which Richard tersely replied: "Well, I'm glad you quite enjoyed it."

Your correspondent confessed to Richard, who plays Prospero in The Tempest, that years of unimaginative teaching of The Bard had put him off.

"That's the education system. You shouldn't teach it in schools. It wasn't written to be read, it was written to be played. The government should make sure all schoolchildren get the chance to see first-class productions."

Asked to refresh his interviewer's hazy memory of The Tempest, Richard responds: "It would take about 14 hours. It contains some of the greatest language ever written and it's got two or three of the most wonderful speeches."

Richard seems to bristle, and not for the only time, when asked if he finds it intimidating to take on a role played so consummately by Sir John Gielgud.

"No. I was a life-long devotee of his but I can't think of him when I'm doing it otherwise I couldn't do it."

Subsequent questions received curt one-word answers...

How did you get into acting? "I became an amateur at 14."

Do you come from a theatrical family? "No."

What did your father do? "He had lots of jobs."

What about your mother? "She was a pianist."

What's next on your agenda? "Nothing."

At the end of the nine-minute interview, a memory of a joke on Have I Got News For You a couple of years ago comes rushing back.

The joke was about a boxer who had fought his way to the World Champion title in a succession of embarrassingly easy matches.

"And his next opponent," quipped Angus Deayton, "Richard Briers."

Now there's a thought.

James Bowman

The Tempest can be seen at Guildford's Yvonne Arnaud on from Monday, November 4 to 9.