STAGE and TV favourite Gareth Hunt is back at Bournemouth's Pier Theatre for the first time since he was taken ill and collapsed on stage midway through a production there two years ago.

The one-time star of The New Avengers, who is playing lawyer Philip Harrison in the Francis Durbridge crime thriller The Gentle Hook, admits that getting back on the Pier stage has been a nerve-racking experience.

"If it was any other theatre it wouldn't be so bad but because it's the same place...

"It's like being on the top board and making a dive when your last one was a belly flop."

But Hunt says he is determined to overcome his fear.

"I had a bad experience but I've got to put it behind me," he says determinedly.

The veteran actor admits that after his illness, caused by a bad reaction to prescribed medication, he considered giving up the theatre completely

"For a while I thought 'that's it.' But you have to face the challenge."

That challenge, he says, is more difficult at the Pier Theatre than anywhere else in the world.

For it is inextricably tied to memories of the night in 2002 when, clearly in difficulties and stumbling through his lines, Hunt made it to the end of the first act of Alan Ayckbourne's Absurd Person Singular before collapsing across a table.

A shocked and confused audience looked on in stunned disbelief as the curtain was brought hastily down and a cast member stepped forward to utter the classic line: "Is there a doctor in the house?"

The ailing actor was taken by ambulance to hospital amid initial rumours that he had suffered a heart attack.

His role in the play was taken over first by an understudy and then by EastEnders star Leslie Grantham.

Hunt, who suffered the indiginity of being delivered to A&E wearing a cheap 1970s style brown suit and full stage make-up (including a dodgy moustache) says he is anxious to move on from the ordeal.

But he does have another hospital story to tell of an occasion when an accident on a TV set saw him arriving in casualty in even more bizarre garb.

It happened midway through shooting a children's adventure series, an explosive charge being used for special effects accidentally went off in his face.

"It was awful. I actually thought I'd lost the sight of one eye," recalls Hunt.

"When they took me to hospital I was wearing a balaclava and my face was all blacked-up for the part.

"I was lying there terrified that I'd been blinded and this nurse started cleaning the make-up off my face.

Suddenly she beamed at me and said "Oh, it's you! Can I have your autograph?"

The Gentle Hook is at the Pavilion Theatre in Bournemouth until Saturday, September 18. Telephone 0870 111 3000.