It was in the late Fifties, says David Roper, that Valley Parade saw its first football hooligan. It was him.

The laconic star of The Cuckoo Waltz and lately EastEnders gazes wistfully at the caf ceiling as he remembers fondly a childhood spent in Bradford City's shadow... picking up cigarette butts and sneaking into the ground at three-quarter time without paying. Those were the days.

"We lived on Midland Road, just near the stadium," says Roper. He drums his fingers on the table impatiently; those fag-ends were habit forming, but they've seated us in a no-smoking area.

"Despite the location, or perhaps because of it, I was never very interested in football.

"All the same, we didn't miss a trick, our gang. Whenever they'd let us in for free, we were there."

His misbehaviour was mild by today's standards. "Someone dared me and I ran on to the pitch," he says. "I snatched the ball from in front of the goalkeeper and ran off with it. You just didn't do that sort of thing in those days, but what could I do? I was dared.

"I must have been the first hooligan they'd seen."

He soon got his comeuppance, though. "A ball came flying into the crowd. Someone in front of me put his fist out to deflect it, and it hit me square in the face. Didn't half hurt.

"I was walking around for weeks with a black face."

It wasn't the last time that facial decorations were to figure in Roper's progression through Bradford.

His hooligan phase behind him, he settled into a job in accountancy, occupying his spare time with amateur acting jobs at the old Playhouse on Chapel Street.

"I did When We Are Married by JB Priestley, and Priestley himself came to see it," he says.

"I was far too young for the part, really. I was only 25 and I was playing a 40, 50 year-old Yorkshire woolman.

"They'd stuck great mutton chop whiskers on to my face. Priestley took one look and said, 'They're wrong. They didn't come in for another five years'."

It wasn't JB Priestley but his biographer, the T&A's late theatre critic Peter Holdsworth, who recommended Roper to move on from the Playhouse. "For years after that, the T&A claimed to have 'discovered' me," he says.

A drama course led to a few small TV roles and then to an audition for the part with which, 25 years later, Roper is still most associated.

The Cuckoo Waltz was a small ITV sitcom which quickly became a big ITV sitcom. "It actually reached number one in the ratings at one time. It was just wonderful to be unknown on Monday evening and then to be famous on Tuesday morning.

"All of a sudden I was getting recognised all over the place."

Roper played a flat-broke local newspaper reporter with a young wife (Diane Keen), a rich lodger (Lewis Collins) and baby twins to feed.

The show was written by an old Granada hand called Geoffrey Lancashire, who also had twins. One of them, Sarah, grew up to play Raquel in Coronation Street.

Years later, Roper too would have twins. He and his family, after years living out of suitcases, settled eventually in Brighton. "It's such an itinerant life, acting," he says.

The Cuckoo Waltz's success earned him a sitcom of his own, Leave It To Charlie. But a long TV hiatus followed.

"After that show ended, I did all sorts of commercial theatre tours. It looked like a well planned career move - but of course it was wasn't at all. When someone offers you a job, you say yes. It's a simple as that."

It was in the 1980s that Roper's television career revived. He played a policeman in Michael Elphick's series, Harry. "Then I appeared on almost every other show on the box, also playing policemen. I did it so often I should have qualified for a police pension."

Finally came EastEnders. Roper came to Albert Square as the college lecturer Geoff, who wooed and won Michelle Fowler, then persuaded her to tape record Sharon confessing to her affair with Phil Mitchell.

The decision by Susan Tully, who played Michelle, to leave the series prompted Roper's departure, too. But it's still an open door.

"I might be the father of her child," he says. "It's either me or Grant."

Currently, Roper is back on something approaching home turf, appearing in the West Yorkshire Playhouse's revival of Patrick Marber's play, Dealer's Choice.

"I'm a professional gambler who plays for very high stakes," he says. "A poker face."

It's a high-profile role, but Roper's bread and butter these days is earned not on the stage but in the lucrative world of commercial voice-overs.

"I've been told I sound reassuring," he says. His, then, are the warm, northern-tinged tones which sell the sponsor's chocolate at the beginning and end of Coronation Street. His is also the voice behind many of the insurance companies' entreaties to part with ever-increasing amounts of cash.

"It's a bizarre, surreal sort of world, and it involves a peculiar skill which I don't know how I come to have," he says.

The coming year, he hopes, holds yet more voice work, as well as another series of a children's show for ITV.

"I still love TV," he says. "Working in the theatre is infinitely more satisfying, of course. But - and maybe I'm just getting on a bit now - with television you do get your evenings free. And I like that."

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