raig Charles calls it his midlife crisis. There he was sitting at home, mid-pandemic, in a fuddle. Because of social distancing rules he could no longer DJ his live music gigs. Sure, there were still the other jobs – hosting his fabulous funk and soul Saturday show on BBC Radio 6 Music, acting on TV (notably Red Dwarf and, in the past, Coronation Street), co-presenting The Gadget Show, writing poetry – but it was the live gigs that gave him most pleasure and brought in the big money. Like so many of us, he began to feel life was on hold, and wondered what his purpose was. He started indulging his vices. “My wife, Jackie, and my kids were having a go at me because I’d put so much weight on. I was doing nothing but getting a suntan from the light inside my fridge, and drinking copious amounts of new-world wines.” That was when his agent rang and told him he had been invited to compete alongside Olympic athletes on Don’t Rock the Boat, an endurance reality show that would involve rowing the length of Britain and climbing down waterfalls. Charles was a good 2st overweight, had had a heart attack a couple of years ago and had four stents inserted, was still a heavy smoker and had only rowed once in his life (when he fell into the Serpentine lake in London). Of course, he jumped at the opportunity. “I was like, yeah, I’ll do that; that will show them!” “Doing Don’t Rock the Boat was my midlife crisis moment. I should have just bought the fucking Porsche! Hehehehe!” He laughs that distinctive scouse-Muttley laugh. “I was trying to prove to myself that I could do all these things that perhaps I can’t do any more, really.” Did he prove himself? In some ways, he says. “I felt a success and a failure. I got through it, but I was scared and disappointed in myself on many occasions. I realised that I’m not a young man any more. I used to be able to party all night, work all day and nothing would really have an effect on me.” On the show, Charles is a sight to behold – within an hour on the boat he has mastered the art of synchronised puking and pooing. When we Zoom, Charles is sitting in his wood-like garden surrounded by towering trees. He still can’t quite believe he lives in this footballers’ paradise in Cheshire. “All the guys around here drive Maseratis or Lamborghinis and all the women drive daisy blue Bentleys. We’re definitely the poor relations.” Having said that, he’s hardly struggling. What does he drive? “Just a Mercedes.” He lights a fag, and tells me how much he has cut down since the heart attack. “I’ve gone down from two packs a day to maybe half a pack a day.” He looks to his left, where Jackie is, out of Zoom’s view. “Jackie’s gone like that, as if I’m Pinocchio.” He strokes his nose. “It’s true, though.” Charles, 56, has had an incident-packed life – so many highs, more than his share of lows. “I can’t believe I’m still here, to be honest,” he says. He is known for his boyish enthusiasm and exuberant cackle. As an actor, he tends to be cast as characters close to home. In the cult sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf he plays Dave Lister – a mischievous curry-guzzling, lager-loving Liverpudlian slob. In Coronation street, Charles’s cabby Lloyd Mullaney is a laddish Liverpudlian cabby and funk enthusiast. In person he’s more nuanced. Yes, the cackling joie de vivre is part of the package, but there is also a more reflective side – mellowness and melancholy. He grew up in Liverpool, the third of four sons born to a father from what was then British Guiana and an Irish mother. His father, a merchant seaman turned lorry driver, liked to tell him they met outside a boarding house that said: “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs.” Was it true? “He was a terrible liar, my dad, so it could be all false. He would never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” It was a tough, often violent childhood – they were the only black family on the Cantril Farm estate, which was notorious for crime. On the school bus, kids would chant racist rhymes. And then there were the beatings. “You go to school and sometimes people would beat you up. Then my mum would tell my dad when he got home from work what I’d done wrong and he’d beat me up, so I spent a lot of time getting beaten up.” I have read that his father was a violent alcoholic. No, Charles says, that’s not quite right – or not how he likes to remember him. “He was a beer drinker and he died at 81 from cirrhosis of the liver, but hadn’t drunk for many years before that. As he got older he calmed down and was a much quieter, more loving, friendly man.” The young Charles loved words. At the age of 12, his teacher entered him for a poetry competition and he won. Can he remember the poem? He ums and ahs, plays coy, then recites it word-perfect. “I knew this kid at school by the name of George McGee. He was always passing wind and blaming it on me. He’d kick me in the classroom and hit me in PE. He’d wait for me to get the ball while playing in the gym Then he’d push me over or kick me in the shin.” At the end of the poem, Charles fast forwards to imagine himself as a young man being pulled over for speeding – yet again a victim of McGee, who by now is a police officer. In fact, by the time he was a young man he was living a very different life. At 17 he was opening gigs with his poetry for the post-punk band the Teardrop Explodes, and before long he was resident poet on Terry Wogan’s TV chatshow, married to the actor Cathy Tyson (they divorced in 1989, and have a musician son, Jack), touring the country as a standup with the anti-Thatcher collective Red Wedge, starring in Red Dwarf – and struggling with success. “Like most young working-class men I handled it badly. Everything just came so fast. I moved from Liverpool to London, bought my first flat in Camden when I was 19 and my head disappeared quite firmly up my arse for many years.” In what way? “Partying all night, drugs, alcohol. Just believing your own hype. Then I’d be late for things or not show up at all. I didn’t put the work in, didn’t have the ethic, didn’t give things the full attention that they deserved. I just flew by the seat of my pants. I could have been so much better if I’d tried, Simon. I promise you.” He was earning silly money, and didn’t know what to do with it. Is it true that he would come across cheques for £200,000 that he had forgotten to cash? “Yeah,” he says sheepishly. “Probably more than that. I’d just stick them in the bedside cabinet. Every now and then, I’d go to the bank and pay them in.” He pauses. “There was a lot of money around in the 80s, wasn’t there?” In 1994, while in his early 30s, Charles was charged with rape. Although he was acquitted, it was humiliating – he was remanded in Wandsworth prison for three months, and the tabloids had a field day with stories about his drug consumption and his penchant for strip clubs. Did he ever think he would be convicted? “No. No, no, not at all,” he says adamantly. “I knew I would get my day in court. You can’t prove something that didn’t happen when all the evidence proves the opposite, so I just needed to get the evidence out there.” He winces. “To be honest, I try not to think about it. I kind of lock it up in a box. It’s too painful for me to visit. Sometimes I do wake up in the night, or something will happen, that triggers a memory.” How did it change him? “It streamlined my life. You really think about what situations and what people you let into your life. You become wary and distrustful of people’s intentions, and keep it tight, keep it family, keep it close friends.” In 2005, by which point he was married to Jackie and had two young daughters, AJ and Nellie, there was another disaster. Pictures of him smoking crack and ogling porn mags in the back of a car were splashed over the red-tops, followed by headlines that he had spent £250,000 on the drug. His driver had sold the photos. It was another humiliation, and this time it was his fault. Charles was suspended from Coronation Street, although a few months later he returned and all was forgiven. He has said the exposé was the best thing that could have happened to him – it forced him to straighten himself out, join Narcotics Anonymous and fight to regain the trust of his family. Not many careers would have survived that, I say. Again he winces. Did he think his was done for? “Maybe … I think …” He stutters to a stop. The thing is, he says, however stupidly he behaved, he has never been nasty. “I’ve always had a good relationship with the people I work with. So it’s really nice when you go through something like that to see people rally around you. I guess if I’d been an arsehole then it would have done for my career.” Since then, he has not looked back and seems to be more in demand than ever. Is he happier? “Erm, yeah, I think so.” He says it’s complicated – his family life is wonderful, but there is so much he is disillusioned with. In some ways, he believes the country is even more bigoted than it was when he was growing up. He talks about the home secretary Priti Patel’s hostility towards migrants. “Her parents are first-generation immigrants who emigrated to this country and gave her opportunities beyond their dreams. How must they feel about the way she’s treating immigrants and the way she talks about immigration now? It’s disgusting. I don’t have faith in any of our great institutions. I don’t believe politicians, I don’t believe priests, I don’t believe the press, I don’t believe the police. The backbones of our society need to be incorruptible, and my respect for them has all gone.” Charles was so shocked by antisemitism in the Labour party that he didn’t vote in the last general election. “What I find alarming is that they can’t even listen to the Jews when they say: ‘D’you know what? That was antisemitic.’ What I also find alarming now is white people are telling me what’s racist. Some white guy is telling me I can’t play historical records by prominent black artists because they have a racist word in them, and you think: ‘What?’” He cites as an example Curtis Mayfield’s Pusherman, which includes the N-word in the lyrics. “I played it at a 6 Music live event, and then when it went on to the BBC Sounds app there was a warning saying some people might find this offensive.” Charles is baffled by the culture wars – and cancel culture. Is it tough as a comic to be told what you can and can’t make jokes about? “Sometimes I feel I don’t want to stick my head above the parapet,” he says. Isn’t it dangerous if somebody like him becomes scared of saying what he thinks? He smiles. “Simon, I’ve been scared to say what I think since I was born.” He’s not joking. And this is what makes Charles fascinating – so outspoken in some ways, cautious in others. “You choose your battles and choose them wisely,” he says. A moment later, he’s talking about Black Lives Matter, and he’s certainly not holding back. “I don’t mind take the knee, but they are just gestures, and I’m not that big on gestures. Once you’ve finished gesturing, you need to do something about it.” Take casting, he says – there’s plenty to be done. “We need people in positions of power to turn round and say, when you’re reading the script, stop thinking in white and black. Most parts can be played by a white woman or black woman, a white man or black man. Stop thinking of Caucasian actors. And especially these days posh, Caucasian actors. I think it’s very difficult for working-class actors and performers to get a foot in today on telly. It’s all just posh bastards. D’you know what I mean? It really is.” He points out that Red Dwarf was radical because half the cast were black, but race was never mentioned. Is that because it is set 3m years in the future? He laughs. “Yeah, we were hoping racism in 3m years’ time would not exist any more!” Charles is still not done with worrying. He fears that live music may never return to what it was. “I’m taking bookings for next summer, but I’m doing it fairly halfheartedly because I don’t think people are going to be comfortable enough to go partying and raving and mingling all those body juices in a nightclub or at a festival any time soon. I think it’s going to take a long time.” A couple of years ago, while Charles was in the Australian outback for I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, his brother Dean died of a heart attack. After Dean’s death, Charles decided to quit Coronation Street. “I’d been there 10 years and thought: ‘Would I be happy if that was my career trajectory?’, and came up with the answer that no, I wouldn’t. I wanted to go and have new adventures.” Since then he has presented The Gadget Show and made a film-length episode of Red Dwarf. He says there are adventures aplenty in Don’t Rock the Boat – not least a bromance with the former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson, and a row with an overly competitive contestant. And he’s not stopping there. He has written a series of epic “Scary Fairy” poems that he’s determined to turn into an animated film, and has compiled an album of classic funk and soul songs. As for his biggest ambition, that’s simple, he says. “I suppose it’s a slog trying to stay relevant. I just want to be relevant, you know. I don’t want to be a footnote. I’m more tired, I’m saggier, and this is a young man’s game. You’ve got young thrusting bucks who want my job, and they’re probably cheaper than me. So it’s a struggle to just stay on point, and you gotta fight for your right to party.” And now the smile is back on his face, and he’s singing. “The Beastie Boys were never wrong,” he says. Don’t Rock the Boat started on Monday and is on every night this week at 9pm on ITV. The Craig Charles Trunk of Funk Vol 1 is released on 6 November.