Interview - Don Warrington: Don sits comfortably in the director's chair

But it makes him the perfect person to direct a play about Calypso set among the island life of Trinidad.

"I reacted to a proposition to direct the show and I thought, 'Yes, why not'," says Warrington.

"Often that's my attitude – unless I can find a good reason for not doing something, I do it."

Warrington is at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, in Leeds, where this month he is directing Rum and Coca Cola in a co-production between the theatre and Talawa.

It is the first foray into directing for an actor who had carved out a long career on the stage after his appearances on Rising Damp made him a household name.

Warrington is 59 and on paper his move behind the action looks like the culmination of some grand plan. Not so.

One assumes that there is a burning desire at this point of his career – having spent his lifetime on the stage – to now want to direct.

"I don't have a masterplan about anything," he says. "The thing about plans is that they don't work. All you end up doing is making another plan.

"Talawa (the theatre company behind the show] came to me and said we want to do Rum and Coca Cola and we'd like you to direct it," he says.

"So I read the play and I thought, 'Oh, it's a two-hander, that's a gentle introduction'."

Born in Trinidad, Warrington was raised in Newcastle, although the

RP accent has always been his and after training at London's The Drama Centre, he learnt early on that a life of an actor demands flexibility.

"When I first started, all my contemporaries were going off into theatres, but it just didn't happen that way. I found myself in a show on television, which I hadn't planned at all. It just happened."

The show was Rising Damp, and in an era when black characters appeared only as the butt of jokes, the arrival of the suave, intelligent Philip Smith on TV screens was ground-breaking.

With the show regularly pulling in more than 10 million viewers, it was also a ratings winner. Predictably, Warrington took it all in

his stride.

"It never struck me as being as big as people seem to remember it. I just carried on with my life," he says.

"People obviously started recognising me, but it never seems as glamorous when you are in it compared to how people view it from the outside."

Rising Damp was so successful that Warrington remains a public figure 30 years on. In the interim, he's been in countless theatre productions, and two years ago popped up on BBC's Strictly Come Dancing.

Now sitting back to the enjoy the fruits of his first directorial labour, one might think he might be tempted to pause and consider the achievements of his career thus far.

Apparently not.

"I take very, very little pride in the things I've done. There's no benefit in feeling anything stronger than 'that's nice' and then getting on with what I'm doing. I don't like to linger.

"I'm not a great one for looking back. I like what I am doing when I am doing it, but the past is the past."

Rum and Coca Cola is at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, to Apr 3.