John Barrowman Laid Bare at St George's Hall in Bradford: Musical theatre veteran on rebuilding his career and Bernard Cribbins

Talking from his home in Palm Springs – thankfully unaffected by California’s devastating recent fires – he is open about his “rebuild” after what has been a tricky few years for his public image.

The star of West End musical theatre, who went on to roles in Doctor Who and the Torchwood spin-off until 2011, is on tour with his show Laid Bare and comes to Bradford in March. He will deliver songs, anecdotes and memories from his decades in showbusiness. But it’s also a chance for his “fan family”, as he calls them, to see him at his most candid.

Barrowman, 57, who is married to husband Scott Gill, says: “People were raving about it, how they liked that I stripped everything back, that I was so approachable, so vulnerable, I talked about a lot of stuff that people did not expect me to talk about.

“I always say with my shows: you will laugh, you will cry, you will feel happy, you will feel sad, but you’ll go away at the end of the night feeling you have been 100 per cent entertained. And that’s what people can expect. I am an entertainer, actor, whatever you want to call me, and that is what you will get – you get what is on my tin,” he says, pointing to a broad, teethy smile.

The show’s name is a play on words referencing, as he says, “all of the things that happened” and his shows feature Q&As with the audience who can ask “whatever they want” – which could be quite the eyebrow-raiser.

In 2021, Barrowman was accused of repeatedly exposing himself years before, on the sets of Doctor Who and Torchwood.

After the reports, Barrowman insisted his “silly behaviour” on the set of the sci-fi series was exaggerated and said he had taken part in “tomfoolery” but denied it was ever intended or interpreted as sexual in nature. He stressed, while talking to morning TV host Lorraine, that the accusations were about “stories that I’ve already told, I’ve been telling them for years, I haven’t hidden anything”.

Today, speaking about Laid Bare to The Yorkshire Post, he agrees that the show is a “rebuild” but adds that “when we say ‘what happened’, 99.9 per cent of everything that was said about me” was “not factual”.

He continues that “no one was offended” on set. “Nobody was upset. It was a creation by the media,” adding that he believes there was “an essence of homophobia in there”.

Barrowman, who born in Glasgow before moving to Illinois in the USA with his family as a child, is not one to shy away from saying what he thinks, which he says comes from being brought up in a household where “we’ve always said what we feel”.

However, early in his career Barrowman also got some valuable advice which helped him to be himself and also to open up about his sexuality. It came from an unlikely source.

“Funnily enough, somebody I disagree with a lot and who disagrees with me a lot on certain things, Andrew Neil. I interviewed him on Live and Kicking, and I asked him a question about that. He said, ‘We as the press have a right to dig into your life and what you do if you lie’. And he said, ‘If you don’t lie, if you tell the truth and you’re up front and honest, we have nothing to dig for’. And that struck me.

“I took his advice and from that point on, Emma Forbes (his Live and Kicking colleague) was one of the first people that I ever told that I was gay. We moved forward and eventually, when I decided to come out publicly, rather than just to colleagues and friends and family, that was it. I decided to live my life truthfully.”

Barrowman’s musical theatre days started with his role as Billy Crocker in Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, in which he worked alongside late actor Bernard Cribbins, beloved in Yorkshire for his turn in the 1970 film version of The Railway Children, which was made in the region.

“Speaking of The Railway Children, Bernie used to talk about that an awful lot when I first was around him,” says Barrowman. “I talk about Bernie in the show. Bernie was one of the people who taught me about comedy, about timing, certain things about that. And he was so generous and kind of took me under his wing, along with Elaine Paige, when I was working with both of them. They were my two leading men and women when I was in my first show, and I was the ingénue.

“Bernie used to call me any time I got a job, no matter what it was, he would call me on the phone wherever I was, and he would congratulate me, tell me how proud he was of me and, in particular, one of the big ones was when I got Captain Jack (Harkness) on Doctor Who. Because we were with the same management at the time. He was unbelievably proud.

“He and I used to sneak off between shows when we first started working together, and I would get in trouble for taking him, or he would get in trouble for taking me. We’d go have fish and chips and mushy peas on Berwick Street Market in Soho and we’d come back, and on the way, we’d get toffee from one of the sweet shops, and we’d get two custard cream donuts from Patisserie Valerie, and we would devour them before the show. And then both of us would go on feeling so bloated and lethargic. I will always have a soft spot for Bernie.” The same is true of his “fan family”, the “people who stick by me,” he says. “I have a vast amount of them and they are loyal, and they speak the truth as I speak the truth, and they have stuck by me through thick and thin.”

John Barrowman is at St George’s Hall, Bradford on Thursday March 6.