Neil Morrissey opens up about a painful childhood growing up in care homes for a TV documentary, he tells Jon Perks.

There was a time when Neil Morrissey’s life imitated his art and he was the archetypal ‘‘man behaving badly’’ – namely his tabloid-splashing affair with married actress Amanda Holden in 2000.

The paparazzi camped outside his house and followed his every move – even if it was only popping to the corner shop for a pint of milk.

The Stafford-born actor says he’s now learned how to live with the media and the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for celebrity tittle-tattle – so much so that his current touring one-man show makes a virtue of it and he opens up the floor to any question.

And we mean ‘‘any question’’...

“In New Brighton (Merseyside) one woman asked what type of underwear I wore,” says the 48-year-old actor, whose CV covers everything from film and TV to children’s programmes, panto and brewing.

“She included a list – boxer shorts, normal pants, Y-fronts or a thong. As it turned out, the lady was asking because she didn’t wear any knickers at all. I don’t know where she was leading with that one.”

Since his early breaks in showbiz – as a young seaman in the 1984 film The Bounty alongside Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins, and as dim biker Rocky in ITV hit series Boon (much of it filmed in Birmingham) – Morrissey has enjoyed a successful and varied career.

He is perhaps best known as hapless Tony in Men Behaving Badly and the voice of children’s favourite Bob The Builder (as whom he enjoyed a number one hit, Can We Fix It?), as well as one half of Yorkshire-based brewers Morrissey Fox.

At the end of the year he will appear in Cardiff as Fagin in the current hit production of Oliver.

“Someone once said I’ve got so many fingers in so many pies I’ve got permanent shortcrust pastry round my knuckles,” he laughs.

“Yeah, I like to be occupied and I don’t like to get bored, so perhaps I have done things that are slightly different to the way other actors have gone about stuff, but for me I wanted variety in my life; there’s a lot of stuff I want to try and I’ve been given those opportunities and I like it too, I enjoy that variety, it keeps the mind alive.”

Morrissey’s life today is a world away from his childhood in Stafford and Stoke, where he spent much of his formative years living in care homes.

The 48-year-old revisits the area – and his past – in a new BBC2 documentary, Care Home Kid, due to be screened next month.

“It does bring the past back into focus but hopefully with my ‘today’ eyes and ‘today’ feelings I try not to get confused with what was bubbling up from the past and what’s happening now,” he says.

“Whenever you’ve been through that you’re bound to end up with a few scars; while it wasn’t an awful battle, it certainly left me with a few nicks and scratches.

“I didn’t want to open those up again – what I wanted to do was figure out what had actually happened and what was the system, because as you get older your memory fades and I didn’t have any photographic evidence of that era and no anecdotal evidence, because I wasn’t with any parent, I didn’t have someone to remind you of those days or that thing, so there are big gaps I just wanted to fill.”

Morrissey is all too aware of how lucky he has been to make good from a care system he feels fails so many.