Steve Huison remembers the days when, halfway through a night out in a social club, a man with a basket of seafood would turn up.

“I should remember it – I was that man!” he grins. “I used to go round pubs and clubs selling wet fish. The trick was to then get out as fast as I could, before the after-effects took hold.”

Shipley actor Steve – familiar to millions as Eddie Windass in Coronation Street – is recreating clubland with a series of cabaret nights featuring ‘turns’ from singers, comics and bands. His first show was a sell-out earlier this year and tickets are going fast for the next one, at Saltaire’s Caroline Street Social Club in May. “I went there during Saltaire Festival and thought it was a gem. It really lends itself to this kind of event, with its glitter ball and bingo machine,” says Steve.

“I want to capture the feel of the working men’s clubs I and many others my age grew up going to. There’ll be a buffet, a magician, singers and a Fifties and Sixties covers band. I’ve had loads of queries from acts wanting to perform, but I’ve had to keep it contained.”

The bill includes club singer-turned-actor Dean Andrews, who played DS Ray Carling in BBC cop dramas Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes, and Shobna Gulati, alias Corrie’s Sunita Alahan.

Steve will compere the show as his alter ego, “failed theatrical agent Squinty McGinty”.

“We’re planning further club nights in September and November,” he adds.

It’s all in aid of the UK’s first Soteria house, a therapy project helping people with mental health problems, to be opened in Shipley.

“It’s based on a tried-and-tested American system helping people in the early stages of psychosis,” says Steve. “It’s a one-to-one talking therapy approach, an alternative to medication. It’s about helping people rebuild their lives.

“The Soteria Network needs £25,000 to get it going, and it will cost that to run each year. We’ve raised about £18,000 so far. When we’ve hit £20,000 we’ll look at renting a property.”

Steve’s Shipley-based Shoestring Theatre Company works with people who have suffered mental illness. Through the Hospital to Home project, patients from Airedale Hospital attend drama workshops at Victoria Hall, Saltaire.

“Most people know someone touched by mental illness,” says Steve. “The numbers are rising, largely down to the times we live in. With cuts and job losses comes poverty, and poverty breeds ill health.”

As reported in the T&A, Steve’s character, Eddie, has been written out of Coronation Street, and he recently filmed his final scenes. “I don’t know why it’s happened, I’ve had so many e-mails and messages of support on Twitter. People seem fond of Eddie,” says Steve. “I’ll miss playing him. It felt like being part of a real family.”

He joined the soap in 2008, when the Windass clan turned up in a grubby van, the latest in a Weatherfield tradition of chaotic families.

Eddie was a work-shy scrounger – when he wasn’t shuffling around on crutches he was lying on the sofa with an overflowing ashtray balanced on his stomach – but he evolved into an endearing family man with a talent for cake-baking. “I thought there was a lot of mileage left in him,” says Steve, who was proud to have been involved in the soap’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

“The tram crash episode took four weeks of night shoots. On the day of the live episode there were 650 people on set – it felt like doing live theatre. It’s annoying when people say ‘it can’t have been live, it was too slick’. We went over and over it three times a day to make sure it was slick!”

Next month it’s the British Soap Awards, and surely this has to be Corrie’s year. Steve’s not so sure. “The whole thing relies on online voting and that’s something younger people do. EastEnders gets a younger audience and they just vote repeatedly online, so it keeps winning. If it continues, the voting system will have to come under question,” he says. Steve, who shot to fame playing Lomper in hit 1997 movie The Full Monty, written by Keighley’s Simon Beaufoy, is a keen artist and has exhibited portraits of Coronation Street stars. This spring he’s taking commissions from the public for portraits, which he will do at Saltaire’s Butterfly Rooms.

Artist, actor, creative therapist and variety show compere – Steve Huison has come a long way since selling wet fish on the club circuit. * The Soteria Cabaret is on Friday, May 6. Tickets are available from Caroline Street Social Club, Fanny’s Ale House, Saltaire, or soterianetwork.org.

uk/news.