“I think she was Prime Minister, but to me she looked like a power-mad swimming baths attendant.”Phillips says he warmed to Sir Plympton’s attitude towards his job “This is a man who became a politician almost by accident He never really wanted to be one. In a bravura solo performance, Sir Plympton surveys the futile decades he has passed on the back benches, most of which now seem a bit hazy “That woman with the loud voice,” he muses. Two years ago, he gave an acclaimed Falstaff in the RSC’s Merry Wives of Windsor.Now he can add to that list On the Whole It’s Been Jolly Good. Peter Tinniswood, who won a Fringe First last year with The Last Obit, has penned this touching one-man play about Sir Plympton Makepeace, an MP unceremoniously booted out of the House of Commons after 60 years of undistinguished service.

He has also appeared in meaty theatre productions such as The Cherry Orchard, Passion Play, Camino Real and Love for Love. Over the past two decades, Phillips has notched up roles in such substantial films as Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa, Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun and Anthony Hopkins’ August. Directors only wanted me to do the old stuff, and my bank manager got worried. But when I finally broke through into more serious drama, it was electric. Everyone said to me, `I didn’t know you could do all that’.”He has now well and truly proved that he can.

It did worry me 25 years ago when I was longing to play serious roles and the cad roles still dominated. After I’d made the switch – the first positive decision of my life – there was a lean period to begin with. If I hadn’t been able to bridge that gap, it would have concerned me. “That MG-driving image has stuck because it’s been exploited around the world – I’ve made more movies than anyone else in Britain, you know. But he is tired of playing the role of the nation’s favourite Lothario, cultivated in such deathless works as Not Now Darling, Don’t Just Lie There, Say Something! and Casanova 73.For the past quarter of the century, he has been desperately trying to shed the tag of a lightweight lecher not safe beside a woman on a sofa. If I ring a bank or an insurance company, I don’t have to say who I am; they always recognise me instantly I can get that special quality into any word It doesn’t have to be `hello’.