I just had it with the mould I was getting put in.” What mould was that? “Well,” says Bob, “I’d work hard on a film and they’d just fuck it up.” I try again: But what mould were they putting you in? Did you think they were trying to pigeon-hole you? Hoskins parries “They can try, but fuck it I do what I wanna do.” One last attempt. “And all with the queen’s head on.” But the commercials irked as many people as they charmed. Late Review pundit Tom Paulin sent a stark message: “Use the phone more or I’ll come round and beat you up.”The man himself shrugs off such criticism “No, bollocks to it,” he says “Fuck it, I do what I wanna do. Fuck it.” This, in essence, is the extent of Hoskins’s self-analysis.In its place, the actor offers chilled white wine, B&H fags and crisps from a porcelain pot. If you load three feet of concrete on, it’ll still grow through; it still gets through. People have got very big stories to tell, they wanna say: ‘Cop a load of this.’ And those stories would blow your fucking mind.”TwentyFourSeven certainly marks a return to form for the 56-year-old; tackling an awkward, demanding role after too long spent as what writer Iain Sinclair calls “a global cockney”, taking the Hollywood dollar and the British Telecom quid.

“I can give you half a million reasons,” he once told an interviewer who asked why he took the BT campaign. For much of the film, he’s your classic salt-of-the-earth do-gooder Then he goes berserk and all is lost. The film is shot in lush black and white by 25-year-old Shane Meadows, spins a vibrant social-realist story, and Hoskins is rightly proud of it “This is the top,” he tells me “For me, this is the most important thing I’ve ever done. It’s very rare to get a chance to do something as indigenous as this It’s the story England’s got to tell now. For 20 years we’ve had to keep our fucking mouths shut ‘cos Maggie Thatcher considered it out of order. She decided the arts in this country were left-wing and tried to send them the same way as the miners.”But all the time English culture has been developing, like grass grows You can’t stop it. Bob plays a small-town saint who sets up a boxing club to help the deadbeat, disillusioned youth of an East Midlands estate.

“If anyone gets out their car and wants to have a fight with me, they suddenly look at me and see themselves hanging up on a meat hook, and soon bottle out.”Hoskins’s latest film, the fine TwentyFourSeven, is more complex. Either way, you wouldn’t want to call his pint a poof.”The great thing about The Long Good Friday is that it’s fantastic for road rage,” he admits. Both are adept at playing fast-talking, working-class rogues, and both possess the canny ability to vary the tone of this persona. Hoskins can appear before us with perfect teeth or without; as a brutal, psychotic bruiser (see The Long Good Friday) or as a chirpy rascal (BT, Mermaids) But it’s all relative.