Only one person was not enjoying himself at Bradford's latest film premiere - the star.

Tom Courtenay, the veteran actor who had put the city on the movie-making map nearly 40 years earlier, announced that he couldn't bear to see himself on screen again, and went to sleep instead.

He surfaced at Pictureville Cinema on Saturday evening only when the closing credits rolled, to acknowledge the applause of the audience.

"I'm saving myself for Tuesday," he had said earlier in the day. "The Stakis hotel's just down the road. I'll have a nap there."

Tuesday's big event is to be the "official" premiere of his new film, a much-vaunted British comedy called Whatever Happened To Harold Smith?

But surely, Saturday's screening in Bradford was the premiere? It was, after all, the first by three days.

"Ah, no, this is just the northern premiere," said an official from the film's distributors. "Tuesday's is at the Empire, Leicester Square, and Lulu will be there."

It was Tom Courtenay, however, that the Bradford crowd wanted to see. When he appeared it was as if the Prodigal Son himself had returned.

The city had changed since he filmed Billy Liar amid its mill stacks and cobbles in 1963, and so had he. Then he was the archetypal angry young man of British cinema. Now, at 63, he cares more for the stage than the screen. Harold Smith, in which he plays the title role, is his first movie for four years.

He and the film were in Bradford as part of the fortnight-long film festival centred on Pictureville and the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television. The film's writer, Ben Steiner, was also in town, and took part in a question and answer session with the audience after the screening.

Courtenay, who said he loved the script as soon as he saw it, plays an unassuming Yorkshire dad who discovers he has the ability to perform miracles. Lulu is his sexy wife and Stephen Fry the boffin who pronounces him the new Messiah.

Preview audiences have hailed the film, which was shot in Sheffield and goes on general release on Friday, as the new Full Monty. But Courtenay said: "It's a very different sort of comedy."

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