Steve Speirs: Home is where the heart is
May
Actor and writer Steve Speirs has made Rhiwbina his home. Emma Kaler speaks to the performer whose career has taken him from the Welsh valleys to Hollywood and back
It’s a Wednesday morning in Rhiwbina and Steve Speirs is in good spirits.
He has just returned from his daily walk in the little park behind his house, dog in tow, neighbours greeted, and there is something in his easy manner that suggests a man who has genuinely landed somewhere he belongs.
“I feel very settled here in Rhiwbina,” he says, settling onto a park bench. “It’s incredibly peaceful, and there’s a real sense of community. There’s something timeless about it.”
For Steve, the rhythms of the Garden Village have become a reassuring soundtrack throughout the year.
“The noise of mowers and hedge cutters tells me it’s a new season. The Summer Festival and children’s voices in the park until dark mark the arrival of the warmer months. Then you get the door Halloween knockers and Santa visits that punctuate the long winter nights. It’s traditional stuff,” he says with evident satisfaction.
“People actually talk to each other.” In the park alone, he has crossed paths with Wales rugby legend Sam Warburton and the landlord of his favourite local pub. It is, he concedes, a rather good place to walk a dog.
He has also, to his own mild surprise, become something of a gardener. “When I first moved here, I’d hear the mowers and think, I’d better get out and show willing,” he laughs. “But now I genuinely love getting the garden back into shape after winter. After all, it is called the Garden Village and you have to keep up appearances.”
The move has also coincided with a remarkably productive spell creatively. Since arriving in Rhiwbina, Steve has been developing a film script, sharpening his stand-up material, and most notably, co-creating two documentary series with his old friend Ruth Jones.
Working from his small office at the front of the house, swapping drafts back and forth with Ruth in London, the pair made Ruth and Steve: From Merthyr with Love and From Porthcawl with Love, a collaboration born, characteristically, out of a very Rhiwbina set of circumstances. Director and co-producer Matthew Tune had been trying to reach Steve about a BBC project marking the bicentenary of Cyfarthfa Castle.
“Rather than going through official channels, Matt a lifelong Rhiwbina resident, posted a request on the local Facebook page asking if anyone knew the actor who had recently moved to the village,” says Steve. “The local drums started beating, introductions were made, and a production meeting was convened although not at the BBC, but at The Butchers Arms. The whole thing seemed very Rhiwbina,” Steve grins. Not too long ago, the resulting Porthcawl documentary picked up the RTS Cymru Award.
“All of it started over a pint in a village pub!”
The pub in question – The Butchers Arms – holds a special place in Steve’s affections. He comes, he explains, from a family of passionate pub-goers, and for him the pub is about far more than a drink.
“It’s the people-watching. It’s an essential ingredient in my work and character-creating. Pubs provide the social backbone, the sports events, pool, darts, dominoes, quizzes, food, debate, romances, parties, christenings, wakes. I genuinely feel that humanity, and what makes us human, is on display in pubs.” The Butchers, he says, has all of this in abundance, along with a brilliantly eclectic clientele, outstanding pub food, a top-notch Sunday roast, and the flourishing Beefy’s Comedy Club, which has drawn top names from across the world.
His other local enthusiasms are delivered with the same warmth. The Rhiwbina Recreation Club, he confides, has one of the greatest bowling greens he has ever seen – and a beer garden from which you can watch what he insists, with some authority, is the best sunset in Rhiwbina. “I probably shouldn’t publicise this,” he says, “but I hope I’ll still be able to get a seat out there this summer.” And then there is the Juboraj restaurant:
“Consistently top taste, great quality food, staff who are genuinely welcoming, a chef at the top of his game. The best part is that it’s only a short waddle home. We’re very lucky to have such places on our doorstep.”
For a man who left Wales at eighteen and spent decades in the Midlands, London, Brighton, and along the South Coast, the attachment he feels to Rhiwbina is notable. “Parts of my heart are still in those places, and most certainly in my beloved Taff Valley,” he says. “But Rhiwbina feels like home now. It simply is home.”
Right now, that home is buzzing with activity. Steve and Ruth are in pre-production on Better Later, a six-episode comedy they have written for the BBC, which shoots in June and July. “It’s an exciting time after the long months of writing through autumn and winter,” he says. “We’re out in the sunshine, choosing locations, and Wales offers so many eye-catching places to film.” The connections keep multiplying: while walking the dog recently, he ran into costume designer Sarah Jane Perez, a colleague he hadn’t seen in decades. It is, he suggests, entirely typical. “Hollywood?” he says, with a grin and a raised eyebrow.
“Who needs Hollywood? Come to Rhiwbina instead!”
Interview and photos by Emma Kaler
