It's been a little over a year since the murderous Darren Whately was expelled from Coronation Street and packed off back to jail.

Now we know where he's been serving his sentence: in a pile of rubbish by the M621.

Banged up and off Corrie's cast list for the duration, actor Andy Robb has found shelter under a pile of twigs and bracken, and is spending Christmas as the animal-like title character of Clive King's children's classic, Stig of the Dump.

It is the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds that has brought Stig to life. For Robb, it's a mixed blessing.

On the one hand, he must spend his evenings dressed in a loincloth made from crisp packets and ties; on the other, he has not a single line to learn.

"That's the good side," he says. "It's four years since I was last on a stage, and this will hopefully remove some of the nerves from a live performance.

"The other actors do all the legwork. I just lumber around in the background."

Stig, who first saw life in print in 1963, is a mysterious and possibly imaginary character of indeterminate age, who has shaggy hair and speaks only in grunts. The hero of the book, a solitary eight-year-old called Barney, befriends him after stumbling upon him in a disused chalk pit.

For Robb, the challenge is to communicate Stig's thoughts by methods other than speech. "I've got to give out some recognisable gestures and expressions if people are going to get inside the character's head," he says.

He has as good an insight into Stig's psyche as anyone: as a boy in Devon the story was drummed into him by his mum.

"She read it to me nightly, and I loved it. It's a very, very cool book.

"As kids we've all made dens. Some of us have had imaginary friends, and we've all had imaginations which we've used and abused, and Stig takes you back to that. Your imagination as a kid is enormous - much bigger than as a grown-up, and this is about all the stuff that you forget as you get older."

In this new production, adult actors portray the children, but it remains very much a family entertainment.

For Robb, it marks a return to live theatre - his last appearance was as an IRA hit man - after four years of popping up in almost every major TV series currently in production.

"I did Wycliffe, The Bill, Casualty, Far From The Madding Crowd and Peak Practice," he says. "But Corrie was the one that opened doors for me."

His character on the Street was in the last throes of a sentence for murdering Nick Tilsley's dad Brian, back in the Eighties.

"Nick had been writing to me in jail, pretending to be Leanne," says Robb. "I got out and thought I was on a promise with her but she didn't know anything about it. So I ended up chasing Nick around the houses and duffing him up, and I got sent down again."

Corrie hasn't seen the last of Darren Whately, however. "They've asked me if I'll go back and I've said yes," says Robb, "but I have no idea when it'll be."

Meanwhile, he's enjoying his time back in Yorkshire. It's his first visit here since his student days, when he spent two years on the stage crew at Scarborough's Stephen Joseph Theatre.

"I was the worst stage hand in the history of the theatre," he says. But he must have impressed Natasha Betteridge, his boss there, because she's now directing him in Stig.

Robb will emerge from his pile of sticks at Christmas for just long enough to make the long drive to Devon, and his parents.

"We do a matinee on Christmas Eve and then I'll hit the road," he says. Abandoned crisp packets and ties on the motorway will, he says, be his.

David Behrens

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