"Soul man". Interview by Paul.

I’m talking to David Soul. At one point arguably one of the two most famous men on the planet, the eponymous Hutch of 70’s TV phenomenon ‘Starsky & Hutch’, I’m sat with him in his local pub The Chippenham, the Maida Vale boozer famed as the spawning ground of The Clash. Yes, you heard me - that’s his local. No LA splendour and Hollywood excess for the Soul man – he’s just turned sixty, the blonde posterboy looks have softened and the man behind them is in the process of applying for UK citizenship. With a genuine love of British culture and community, Soul, born David Solberg, eldest of five children born of a Lutheran minister, raised in Germany, teenaged in South Dakota, native of NYC and LA in his time, has found his ‘spiritual home’ in London. He even supports Everton, for Christ’s sake… No stranger to media attention, he has experienced both the highs (as an actor, director and award winning documentarian), but also the lows (he was jailed for beating his third wife, Pattie Carmel, whilst she was 7 months pregnant and was subsequently ordered to attend therapy classes for alcoholism) with a number of news stories highlighting his more negative character traits and acting choices. But all that was prologue to the David Soul who sits with me now, a fresh Marlboro Light screwed firmly between his lips. He’s an older, wiser and more grounded man who, though still indulging in more than the occasional pint, is at peace with himself and happy to do what he has always done… to entertain people.

But how and why did he decide to make the move to do it in the UK?

I’m sat atop my mountaintop mansion [in LA], with more money than I had ever seen in my life. I’d bought my parents a home. But then instead of going after a career, I started thinking, getting involved with the question ‘is that all there is?’

When you were at the top of you game, you could have done pretty much anything you wanted… but instead you decided to get out…

I was… tired. Tired of all the bullshit and tired of the strangling of the telephone cord, waiting for the phone call. It’s just not really an ideal town in which to exist as a human being, so it’s not really a place that I wanted to be. It’s not the end of the world, but you can sure see it from there.

Stints in New Zealand and France followed, before an offer to appear in the West End brought you to London…

I’d always dreamed of coming to do theatre in the birthplace of English speaking theatre, so I came over here… I never wanted to be one of those fly-by-night Hollywood actors who flies in here, rapes the stage and disappears again, claiming how much they’ve sacrificed, getting paid only $250 a week when they can get paid so much more to do a film. So I arrived for what originally started out as three months, which turned into six months… then a year, then five, six, seven…

When I arrived here [in Britain], there were four basic institutions [as I saw it] that gave a sense of basic community that I responded to as a human being… The Pub, the church, the theatre. and of course, football; they gave me a sense of the humanity of this island - it’s a little island, lets face it - and these were four things that I was missing in LA and elsewhere in the world. The further I got away from the mid-west, which embodied those kind of values from my youth, the more I realised that I wanted to see those values again… It wasn’t until I came here that I found them…

You may recall turning on the TV a few years ago and seeing broadcaster Martin Bell, ‘The Man In The White Suit’, going door-to-door during his political campaign – and who was that to his left? That American actor from The Telly. What was he doing there…?

Martin Bell stood for the common man, who appreciated how important [these values, and sense of community] could be to society. That’s why I like him and what he represents so much... I said ‘anything I can do to help, I’m there.’ We’ve become good friends.

Have your personal beliefs always strayed beyond your TV persona?

I went out to do a documentary for PBS, ‘The Fighting Ministers’, about the impact from the shutdown of the steel industry on Pittsburgh churches [and their flocks]. I committed the cardinal sin for a documentarian and I came around from behind the camera and got involved! I was arrested during protests, and my brother, a well-liked pastor, was defrocked for standing up for his flock… The church didn’t like the image of him doing this kind of thing; they defrocked him, for conduct unbecoming a pastor, for standing up for his people…it was really sick…

You famously sued The Mirror for a review written by then-columnist Matthew Wright (now notorious for loose-lipping John Leslie’s name in the unofficial Ulrika Johnson rape debate), who called your West End show, ‘The Dead Monkey’, “…the worst thing [he had] ever seen”… without actually seeing it. A faux pas that cost The Mirror, upwards of £250,000 in damages and legal costs…

My feeling was that one of the foundations of journalism is that you have a right to report facts as you see them – that’s right, that’s the way it should be; and though we hate critics they work symbiotically with the theatre. We may not like what they write, but it’s their right to write it. But God damn it, you gotta actually go and see the fucking play, you know… And he didn’t go and see it… I think its pretty fucking important if you’re a journalist to do your job honestly and correctly.

And [though we didn’t win in court, we were] acknowledged as winning, because normally you don’t do this with reviews… it was the first time in 100 years that a review had been challenged and that the plaintiff had won against bad reportage…

Clearly your argument isn’t against bad press itself, rather bad journalism. You have, for example, talked openly about your brief (and well documented) jail-term for domestic violence… It was a big news story back in the eighties and is often regurgitated in articles about you, but journalists seldom seem to report on the fact that you now lecture and offer council in prisons to other domestic violence offenders. Do you still do that?

Yeah, but it’s not something I wear openly on my sleeve, but you have to face up to things… deal with them and just put the experience behind you… learn from it.

Speaking of the press, they’ve also reported some quite negative comments from you about the forthcoming Ben Stiller/Owen Wilson ‘Starsky & Hutch’ movie…

They generally write ‘he didn’t like Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson doing their parts, he’s just got sour grapes’. That’s not what its about; I think Ben and Owen are great! …This was never an attack on the boys; it was an attack on the corporate mentality that puts branding ahead of relationships - and that I do still have a problem with… Back in the 70’s [we] developed a relationship [with the viewers]; the family became involved - it was like what [Starsky and Hutch] did was part of the family… There are a lot of people in their thirties, forties, who come up to me and say ‘I gotta tell you, you’re the reason I could stay up on a Saturday night’… [Paul Glaser and I] wanted to tell the story of what happened with these guys 25 years down the road; to bring closure to not only our [characters’] relationship, but with the relationship we developed with people all over the planet - ‘what happened to those guys?’ - and in a way that says, ‘we respect you as an audience’; it dignifies them for their time in watching us back then… and that’s what I had a problem with, not that it’s been written down the way I’ve explained it to you before…

Paul and I [appear in the movie in a cameo] right at the end, passing the torch… its kinda fun actually… It’s the first time we’ve ever received applause when we walked on and applause when we walked off the set. They treated us both with such respect and such dignity… it was a wonderful experience…

There’s obviously still a massive public interest in your original series…

Yeah, people come up to me all the time… Paul’s original jacket and cardigan sold for $48,000 [in auction]… whoever bought them sure liked the fuckin’ show!

And finally the fanboy question, (already asked twice tonight by passers-by in the pub); did you hurt your arse when you jumped off the wall onto the car bonnet in the ‘Starsky & Hutch’ titles?

No, I didn’t really hurt myself, it was only about two metres and I knew the car had some give… but you know, as the years go on that wall gets a little higher each time I tell the story…