JOHN Savident in full anecdotal flow is surely one of the great phenomena of British show business today, a spontaneous outpouring so entertaining that it should really be classed a national treasure and saved for posterity.

Even the fact that he's recently been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, now brought under control by medication and some changes in diet. "My least favourite four-letter word!" he pronounces.

Audiences will know John best, of course, as Fred Elliott, Coronation Street's booming butcher and one of Weatherfield's most enduring comic creations. What they might not realise that the actor, who was born in Guernsey and grew up in Manchester, actually started out in a very different career, pounding the beat as a young Lancashire police officer.

"I was a policeman for six years," he explains. "Do you remember John Stalker? I was with him. We were cadets and PCs together."

Already an enthusiastic amateur, however, when the chance came to join a touring production of old musical favourite The Student Prince, starring John Hanson, in 1962, he took it. Over the next three decades he appeared in the full range of TV shows, including The Saint, Callan, The Avengers, Doctor Who and even that other piece of cult sci-fi, Blake's Seven.

He's been a costume drama regular too with parts in such prestigious slices of ratings hit fare as Moll Flanders, Middlemarch and Parnell and the Englishwoman.

His film career included everything from The Battle of Britain to The Remains of the Day, A Clockwork Orange to Loch Ness and the period romp The Wicked Lady.

There was a host of theatre too, with parts in rep and the West End - The Phantom of the Opera, Annie, Henry IV, Sweet Bird of Youth, She Stoops to Conquer and See How They Run.

There were also many leading parts at the Royal National Theatre, where one of his biggest roles was as Hollywood director Otto Preminger in ill-fated and short-lived musical Jean Seberg which went to Broadway.

In 1994, though, he won a lasting place in the nation's affections when he first blustered his way into Coronation Street as the redoubtable Fred Elliott, a man who would never use one word when ten would do.

"I based that on people I knew who really spoke like that," he says. "It was all to do with the Industrial Revolution and the Lancashire mills, where people repeated themselves because of the noise of the looms."

So Fred is gone, but in his place comes another larger-than-life Lancashire character, the overbearing Mr Hobson, heavy-drinking boot-maker and ultimately browbeaten father - a sort of northern comic King Lear you might say - in the new touring revival of stage classic Hobson's Choice.

"I didn't want to do it really because it was another Lancashire character," he admits.

The early performances at Chichester, where the show opened, were, he says, hampered by his then undiagnosed diabetes, but now the show is on the road he's feeling increasingly comfortable with the performance, which comes to Windsor very soon.

Hobson's Choice comes to the Theatre Royal Windsor from Monday, March 3 to Saturday, March 8. Tickets: 01753 853888

Interview by John Highfield