ACTOR David Roper - currently playing Mr Birling in the classic J B Priestley thriller An Inspector Calls at Lighthouse in Poole - feels he has a strange affinity with the play.

For, as he explains, he has connections with J B Priestley that go back 100 years. Not, he hastens to add that he's 100 years old, but in the early 1900s his paternal grandmother was a playmate of the young Priestley at the Green Lane Primary School in Bradford.

Grandma Roper's verdict on J B - one of the giants of English literature - is perhaps less flattering than one might expect: "He was a cocky little begger with his backside hanging out of his breeches" she apparently told her family.

Many years later David Roper had the opportunity of checking out her succinct assessment of the great man when he met him at the 40th anniversary of the founding of The Bradford Civic Playhouse.

He says that although the playwright had evidently polished up his social skills and thankfully persuaded his mum to sew up his trousers, Priestley was still unmercifully blunt in his opinions.

"Frankly, I don't think he was over-impressed by my performance in his play When We Are Married, telling me I was too young to be playing Mr Halliwell and accusing me of wearing anachronistic whiskers. He was right on both counts."

Also present on that occasion was another Bradfordian, the actress Billie Whitelaw. When young Roper proudly announced he was going to drama school that autumn, she replied: "I think you should."

"With the arrogance of youth, I assumed she meant I was so good that I deserved to go. Years later, it dawned on me she probably meant I was so bad that I needed to go," he says.

After two years at The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and three years in rep he landed his first TV part playing the copper who arrested Eddie Yates for nicking tins of corned beef from the corner shop in Coronation Street.

It was an undistinguished debut. Instead of pushing the door to enter Eddie's flat, Roper pulled it.

"The knob came off in my hand. With only a second to go before the director would shout 'cut!', the floor manager, with remarkable presence of mind, grabbed the offending knob, gave me one almighty shove and I burst in on the unsuspecting Eddie. Afterwards, the director complimented me on such a realistic entrance.

A lead role in the TV sitcom The Cuckoo Waltz followed plus a variety of national theatre tours in plays like Funny Peculiar, Noises Off and Intimate Exchanges. He also played Michelle Fowlers' tutor, Geoff Barnes, in EastEnders.

This is his second tour in Stephen Daldry's much garlanded production of An Inspector Calls, which also features occasional appearances by Roper's nine-year-old twin sons Harry and Jack.

Hailed as a modern masterpiece and the winner of more awards than any other play in the history of the theatre, it was originally written at the end of the Second World War and set before the First.

This is its fifth tour.