Sam Neill’s diary: Back in Blighty, remembering drinking binges of yore

I am back in the UK for work. Great time to turn up — after the grim, grey grind of the British winter. Here in Manchester, people stroll in shirtsleeves or T-shirts, though it’s still only 15 degrees. They are, in truth, dazzlingly white. Their semi-nudity strikes me as a tad premature, but then I’ve only just left my Indian summery vineyard in New Zealand via Bondi Beach.

I’m here at the behest of BBC2, for a second season of The Peaky Blinders. If you didn’t see the first season, you should. And if you don’t … I know where you live. And having played Chief Inspector Campbell, I know how to remove your fingernails. Be warned. Campbell is the psycho cop from hell (well, Belfast), and is more fun to play than any part I remember. This is in large part because our writer Steven Knight gives him such graphic, biblical dialogue. But also because Campbell is complex: mad, sad and utterly beastly. What sport.

At the craft Baftas this week, the Peaky Blinders director Otto Bathurst and cameraman George Steel got deserved gongs. But for the actors, not even one nomination. We feign indifference, not terribly convincingly. Naturally, if we actually won a Bafta, we’d keep it in the lav — this is de rigueur. Of course, it’s also the one place in the house where one can guarantee that guests will see the gong.

In fact, nothing beats the pleasure that comes from working with actors from this part of the world, and on Peakys we have a very smart young cast — Cillian Murphy, Helen McCrory, Annabelle Wallis among others. They are brilliant. However, actors are curiously abstemious these days. Gone are the times when it was considered good manners among British thesps to sink at least three pints at lunch in the Pinewood bar.