Mike Burnside - D.A.C. Hicks

I HAD the opportunity to chat with Mike Burnside the other day. Best known to viewers of The Bill as D.A.C. Hicks, a role he played for nine years on and off.

Those listed on IMDB include: Something to Remember (27 September 1990), Grief (1 January 1991), Start to Finish (5 February 1991), The Public Interest (7 March 1991), Saints and Martyrs (14 May 1991), Initiative (20 June 1991), Targets (4 July 1991), Done Is Done (27 January 1995), Deeds of Mercy (28 April 1995), Merrily on High (24 December 1996), Twanky (22 December 1997), Up for Trouble (23 June 1998), King of the Road (4 August 1998) and Good Relations (13 July 1999).

Here’s what he had to say about his time on the show.

“It’s amazing to think that I was in The Bill for nine years, but of course I wasn’t in it all the time. I just used to pop in and out of it, which was really a very nice job. I loved it actually.

“In the very first one I did, Andrew Paul, who played PC Quinan, was to be given an award for bravery and they had to have a senior officer to do that. So it was all set in another place... it was supposed to be the Headquarters of the MET.

“The then Executive Producer, who was really the boss, was a man called Michael Chapman, and he quite liked what I was doing in that episode and he called me in and said, ‘Look, I think we can use you quite a lot. Are you interested?’ I said I was.

“So they built two or three stories around the character, which was lovely. I don’t know how many I did, but there were a lot of them over a long period of time.

“I think what Michael wanted to do in those days was to make Sun Hill part of a bigger scene. That was often talked about and at that time Sun Hill had the feel of the Metropolitan police being all around it. In a sense it has drifted away from that over the years and become inward-looking. The stories are now critically about the force working at Sun Hill.”

Mike Burnside is currently playing the roles of Mr Porter and Mr Gryce in the national tour of Kes catch it at the following venues: 27-31 October, Edinburgh King’s Theatre/2-7 November, Oxford Playhouse/10-14 November, Bradford Alhambra Theatre/17-21 November, Wolverhampton Grand Theatre/24-28 November, Cardiff New Theatre.