Peter Sellers, Lionel Jeffries and Leo McKern had all said no. The BBC was getting worried.

Only four days remained before rehearsals began for a new sitcom, and still there was no leading man.

Warren Mitchell was next on the list. He didn't think the script was funny but, as he candidly admits: "I was out of work at the time."

It turned out to be a good move. The sitcom was Till Death Us Do Part, and Mitchell's character, the Cockney motormouth Alf Garnett, was to become his pension.

Even now, nearly 35 years after that first rehearsal, he cannot resist screwing up his face at every opportunity and lapsing into mostly unprintable Alf-speak.

At 75, the trademark moustache has turned white. There is no hair on top but Mitchell's white eyebrows are long enough to keep a team of barbers in business.

"Dreadful, some of the stuff I did in those days," he says of those pre-Alf years, a time in which he depended upon getting work in thick-ear dramas on TV - most of them long forgotten. Casting directors favoured him as a sinister foreign type.

"I was Roger Moore's taxi driver in The Saint once," he recalls through a haze of old video tape.

He was on stage, too, starring in Ted Willis's play, The Blue Lamp, with an actor who each night had to be shot dead while clutching his head, lest his wig fall off.

Alf Garnett ended the lean years, and Mitchell in turn made Johnny Speight's creation one of the most recognisable faces on television. If he found the scripts unfunny at first, he soon warmed to Speight's deeply jaundiced outlook on life. When the writer died last year, he felt the loss personally.

"We were friends," he says. "We saw each other all the time.

"The great thing about Johnny was, he knew how to use a computer but absolutely everything else was a mystery to him.

"When I was at his house he couldn't make me a drink because he didn't know where the coffee was. I had to do it myself."

Mitchell refuses to lay Alf completely to rest. Though there will be no more TV shows, he continues to perform a one-man show in the familiar raincoat and West Ham scarf.

However, it is an altogether weightier engagement that has brought him now to Yorkshire.

This weekend, he begins a five-week run of Visiting Mr Green, an acclaimed first play by an American called Jeff Baron. The West Yorkshire Playhouse is mounting its British premiere, although Mitchell performed it previously in Australia, playing opposite his son, Danny.

He is cast as a retired and miserable New York dry cleaner who must take under his wing the younger man who nearly ran him over in rush hour traffic and who is now doing community service to work off his fine.

"It's a thought-provoking piece but a funny one," says Mitchell. "If it plays in Yorkshire it'll play anywhere."

His co-star this time, who he pretends never to have heard of, is Reece Dinsdale, familiar from TV series like Home to Roost and also the star of Wild Oats, the Playhouse's inaugural production exactly ten years ago.

"I don't know any actors under 50," says Mitchell. "When they said Dinsdale, I presumed they meant old Mr Landen."

Reece, for his part, is glad of the chance to be back on home turf. He lives in London now, but his family remains in Normanton near Wakefield. Saturday matinees permitting, he'll be found watching his beloved Huddersfield Town.

Mitchell, meanwhile, regards the play as an act of public service.

"It is the duty of actors to come and work in the provinces," he says. "Cities like this don't get a fair deal. All the public money goes to London."

He'd tell the Prime Minister as much, except he's fallen out with the family.

Tony Booth was Alf Garnett's Liverpudlian nemesis on Till Death... both on and off the screen. He's also the father of Tony Blair's wife, Cherie.

"He annoyed me so much off the set that all those insults I threw at him were for real," he says. "I used to vent my spleen in his direction."

He screws up his face once more as he recalls the years of unpleasantness. "Scouse g*t!"

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.