Dave Turner, former firefighter and FBU North-East regional chair, plays a key role in the latest Ken Loach film. He spoke to Steve Morgan
“It was the best job in the world,” says Dave Turner. “I worked with some of the best people you’d ever work with in your life.”
It will come as no surprise to those who know the star of Ken Loach’s film The Old Oak, that he is referring not to his part in Loach’s latest – and possibly last – cinematic offering, but the 30 years in the fire service that helped convince the veteran director Turner’s shoulders were broad enough to carry the film.
A 15-minute-plus standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year suggests that confidence was well-placed.
The Old Oak follows the relocation of Syrian refugees to a Durham pit village that has been bruised, broken and downtrodden for decades; the kind of place Gateshead-born Turner knows well.
So well, in fact, that Loach and long-term scriptwriting collaborator Paul Laverty used him as their taxi-driver-cum-guide for their initial location recces.
Like his character, T J Ballantyne, landlord of the pub that gives the film its title and that acts as the backdrop for two communities trying to get by, 60-year-old Turner has seen life close up.
He joined the service at 21 in August 1984, the year of the miners’ strike, and rode a fire engine for 26 years, making the FBU journey from Tyne and Wear branch rep, to divisional, brigade, and finally, North-East regional chair.
LAST THING ON HIS MIND
Acting was the last thing on his mind when leaving the fire service in 2014. Role-playing scenarios at national school had been his sole public performances prior to turning up, close to his retirement, to a project looking to make a north-east based drama.
He had no idea 16 Films had anything to do with Loach, and largely went along as a favour to a contact who had passed up the opportunity. “He’d said ‘no, it’s not for me’,” he recalls. “So they asked him if he knew anyone who might be interested. They basically asked him: ‘do you know any gobshites?’ He naturally thought of me!”
An initial 45-minute meeting led to a couple of “read-throughs” and minor parts in Loach’s previous two films I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You.
Turner clearly impressed with scenario workshops along the way, during which he had been told: “your wife’s terminally ill, the water tank’s burst in your house, there’s water in the electrics, it’s half-past-four on a Friday afternoon and you’re ringing Northumbria water to complain.”
The clincher, ironically, had him playing the part of an “old, jaded trade union official”. Art, for once, not imitating life.
One of Loach’s calling cards is his casting of non-professional actors – he believes the camera always shows who you really are. In Dave Turner he had struck gold.
As Loach intimated recently, Dave Turner isn’t so much playing TJ Ballantyne – he is TJ Ballantyne. The Syrian refugees are Syrian refugees.
IMPOSTER SYNDROME
Turner, an engaging, warm presence, admits struggling with imposter syndrome – a fear as challenging as any faced in his other working life.
There was also the dawning realisation that his part was meatier than he had expected – the nightly arrival of the next day’s scenes contained more and more for him to do.
He had initially imagined himself playing one of the pub’s regulars, juggling the film work while tending to his seriously ill father and working at a vehicle-hire company. By May 2022, it was clear the job had to go.
The experience was surreal – the cost of the BMW whisking him from Nice airport to his hotel could have paid six trainee firefighters’ yearly salaries
Turner’s desire is that people will see The Old Oak as a message “of hope and humanity”.
The experience was surreal – not least May’s Cannes trip, where the cost of the BMW whisking him from Nice airport to his hotel could have paid six trainee firefighters’ yearly salaries.
Though the project has been “an honour from start to finish”, he’s excited to “get back to normality” and his season-ticket watching his beloved Newcastle United. Home is where the heart is.
“I was more nervous about the Q&A at the premiere in Newcastle than standing up in Cannes. All the North-East FBU regional committee were there,” he says. “As you’d expect, I’ve been mocked and ridiculed – I’d have been worried if I hadn’t.”
At 60, he is unlikely to change, but that “imposter syndrome” dies hard. “I’ve seen [the film] six times now,” he says. “And every time, I see something else I think I’ve done wrong. I’m going to have to stop watching it.”
If it is as wonderful and unlikely a success story as they come, Turner cannot quite comprehend it either.
“I’ve never had any ambition in acting whatsoever – and to be brutally honest, I still don’t,” he says.
“I was chatting to Matt Wrack when he came to the premiere with a couple of executive committee members – I said you should get that in somewhere: role playing at national school can lead to this …”
With that, and one more hearty laugh, TJ, sorry, Dave, calls time …
