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Extra wild Four series of Wild At Heart have turned Stockton’s Stephen Tompkinson into a real fan of Africa. Viv Hardwick reports. STOCKTON-born actor Stephen Tompkinson can’t seem to get enough of Africa. Just as the latest ten-part series of popular ITV1 series, Wild At Heart, begins transmission this weekend he’ll be filming a hot air balloon adventure inspired by a Jules Verne book. With a storyline taken from Verne’s Five Weeks In A Balloon, the three-part factual series will see Tompkinson travel coast-to-coast visiting Tanzania, Rwanda, Zambia, Botswana and Namibia. Along the way he’ll meet extraordinary people and, just like his Wild At Heart vet, Danny Trevanion, he’ll report on those who care for the wildlife as he floats past Kilimanjaro, through the Serengeti, past Victoria Falls and over the Okavango Delta on the way to Namibia’s famous Skeleton Coast. “Having spent the last four years filming Wild At Heart, I’ve developed a passion for Africa and a hunger to see more and learn more about this fascinating continent, and what better way to do it than by hot air balloon? I can’t wait,” he says. His return to these shores will be marked by a UK tour of Tim Firth’s latest comedy, Sign Of The Times, which plays York’s Opera House on April 14-18. Here, Tompkinson plays Yorkshireman Frank Tollit who is desperate to make a success of erecting giant sign letters on the sides of buildings after 25 years of failure. Lack of success haunts the opening episode of Wild At Heart on Sunday when the Leopard’s Den animal hospital sees newlywidowed Danny battling to keep his family and business together. The custody courts are threatening to send his stepson, Evan (Luke Ward- Wilkinson), back to his father in Britain. Dawn Steele (from BBC1’s Monarch of the Glen) joins the cast of this fourth series as feisty vet Alice Collins, along with Juliet Mills – replacing sister Hayley – playing Georgina, sent to take care of the irascible Du Plessis (Deon Stewardson). Alongside a romantic adventure, audiences will see vet Danny swimming with a hippo, beating back lions, being charged by an elephant and trying to avoid being a (wild) dog’s dinner. The hippo incident was actually based on real life when Tompkinson was touring Africa in a dress and heard about a tame hippopotamus. He says: “Two years ago, I was on tour in the comedy Charley’s Aunt, when this guy sent me a DVD, saying he had the only tame hippo in Africa. I thought ‘You can’t have because hippos kill more human beings than any other animal’ but I watched the DVD about a couple on a branch of the Limpopo, about five hours from where we film at Glen Afric. “They woke up one morning, after huge flooding, and this baby hippo, still with its umbilical cord, had been washed away from its mother onto their property. They couldn’t have children of their own, and for the last seven years, they have raised Jessica as their baby. “She goes in the house, watches TV and sleeps on a mattress with a blanket over her. They said ‘You should use it in your programme’, so I showed it to executive producer Charlie Pattinson who said we’d better do it. “So we went to the Limpopo, for the first filming of the new series. The footage in Episode Two is amazing, and just to get that close to a hippo is incredible.” This year, Tompkinson also gains a credit as an executive producer. “I said I’d like to be more involved, and Charlie and George at Company Pictures very kindly said ‘Would you like to be an executive producer?’ Because I had a taste of the other side of the camera a couple of years ago, directing The Lightning Kid for the BBC, it was to try and add another string to my bow. “I’ve been involved with the storylines from the beginning because there’s obviously quite a big transition this year after the death of Amanda Holden’s character Sarah. It’s given us the opportunity to introduce a lot of new characters and there are a lot more avenues to explore. “I was seeing if I could help with the process rather than hinder it.” Talking of newcomers Dawn Steele and Juliet Mills, Tompkinson says: “Dawn was top of my list to play Alice. I worked very briefly nine years ago with her in a film, Tabloid TV, which never saw the light of day. “It was a very bizarre shoot. There was one day I was sitting on a sofa between James Hewitt and David Soul, thinking what the hell am I doing here? Juliet just arrived on the set to replace Hayley and hit the ground running, and she and Deon as Du Plessis are hysterical as sparring partners. And having Hayley out there for the final episode was very special and emotional for all of us.” Tompkinson admits that even back in the UK, he can’t forget the animals of Wild at Heart. “I do dream about them an awful lot between series,” he recalls. While filming in South Africa, he was visited by his daughter, Daisy, during her school summer holidays and at half-term. For the first time in four years’ working near Johannesburg, he had enough time off to visit Cape Town. “I had five days, including a weekend, and I’ve never had that before; I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. It felt very odd,” he says. - Wild At Heart, ITV1, Sunday, 8.30pm ?
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