Ex-Brookie star Louis dares to bare on stage

It’s the first thing Louis Emerick is asked.

“Do you actually DO the full Monty?!”

And after joining the cast of the stage production, Louis himself was a bit surprised at the answer.

“We do! We honour the writer’s intention and go the full Monty and it’s very cold in some of those theatres!” laughs former Brookside star Louis, 51.

“I assumed there’d be something under the hat but there isn’t, it’s au naturel when I was told the thong actually comes off, I was like: ‘Oh my God!’.

“We’re reliably informed that through clever lighting, nobody gets to see anything but every city we go to, we’ll make sure we find out what the lighting technician likes to drink and look after him!”

The Full Monty is one of the great British comedies, and Louis says: “It’s sheer class. You forget how funny it is.

“But one of the things we’ve spoken about those of us in the cast who are old enough to remember those times, the early to mid-80s is the decimation of whole communities by the Thatcher Government.

“That’s the setting for the story, the closing down of mines and steelworks, whole communities becoming ghost towns, and the comedy comes out of that.

“So when you say to people ‘The Full Monty’ and immediately they say: ‘Oh, yeah, you all get your clothes off, don’t you?’, we just hope they also take in the desperation that drove these guys to do this.

“That said, I’m sure there’ll be some nights when there’ll be hen parties out there in the audience, maybe coming to start their night off before moving on to whatever!”

Louis Is following in family footsteps of a sort as Paul Barber played his character Horse in the movie.

“Paul’s my ex-brother-in-law, we share a nephew,” nods Louis.

“He was one of my inspirations for actually getting into the business. When he came into our family, he was touring with Hair alongside Paul Nicholas and Robert Powell.

“So we had this bona fide star in our house and you think: ‘Here’s a guy with the same background as me.’

“I had this perception you had to be from this privileged background to go to certain colleges to get into the business but this made me realise that wasn’t the case.

“As soon as I got the call for this, I rang him and he was delighted. We’re taking the show to Ipswich, where he lives, and he’s going to come and see it.”

For many people, Louis will always be Brookside’s Mick Johnson, the lovable pizza shop owner.

“I still get called ‘Mick’ in the street, of course I do, and it doesn’t bother me at all,” he smiles.

“In fact, I find it quite nice. You were in people’s living-rooms three nights a week, you know what I mean?

“It was 12 happy years of my life and I’m proud to have been associated with it I loved Mick, and I loved the programme.

“Brookside came at a good time. I’d been five years in the business, theatre and a couple of days of telly here and there, including my one and only episode to date of Coronation Street in 1986.

“But times were hard, I was doing part-time work in an off-licence, I had two young children from my first marriage, it was tough.

“The phone was cut off so I had to take calls in the off-licence until a lovely lady called Rita who lived opposite helped me out.

“I was the only guy in the close out of work, so I saw her every day when she’d take her granddaughter to the same school as my kids.

“I don’t know how I came to tell her but she offered to pay my phone bill. I wouldn’t take the money but I said: ‘Can I ask for the next best thing? Would you mind if I gave your number to my agent because she has a hard job getting hold of me?.’

“So that’s how I got the news about my audition for Brookside.

“Rita would take the calls and tell me: ‘This is your call time.’ She was just lovely.”

The Full Monty is at Glasgow King’s Theatre from September 23 to October 4, and tours the UK until May. For information, visit www.fullmontytheplay.com