There was a fantastic story about Noel Clarke in a tabloid newspaper a while back. It was nothing sordid, just a few lines. It described how a “nutty” female fan planned to “surf history” with him after she had managed to deposit a lifesize Tardis in the garden of the “Cockney hunk”. It’s brilliant, you couldn’t make it up. Bring up the episode with Clarke, and you expect it to cue bashful laughter. Instead, nothing.

“Sorry… a Tardis where?”, he frowns, hesitantly. In his garden? “Really? Where did you hear that? Ahh…” He smiles. “Well, there you go. I’ve not seen that story, but it’s not true. And I’m not a hunk or a Cockney. I thought I was quite well spoken, actually,” he says, a little hurt. “Anyway, I thought Cockneys were from East London.”

Clarke is a West Londoner, who grew up under the sentry of Trellick Tower and among tributaries of the Westway. It’s where he is today, sitting on a couch in the Westbourne Studios complex of meeja offices, sipping the single cup of tea he allows himself a day. He is, as it happens, quite well spoken, estuary-by-way-of-the-Caribbean tones bubbling over when he talks quickly or about his mum. Flitting between crisp and congenial, there’s the suggestion of the more eloquent sportsman or, for some reason, policeman, about him. He’s casually turned out, but holds a suit for the photo shoot later. It all adds to the sense of a man leading a double life, which, in a way, he is.

On the one hand, there’s Noel Clarke off the telly, who in 2006 was voted Best Male Guest Actor by readers of Dr Who Adventures for his stint as Mickey Smith, the hapless boyfriend of Billie Piper’s character, Rose. A Bafta it ain’t, but it crowned a rising trajectory across what could be a classic Radio Times listings spread, starting with appearances on The Bill, A Touch of Frost and pretty much every hospital drama going, before hitting the big time with Auf Wiedersehen Pet and Dr Who. Based on this, if you had to hazard a guess as to the next step for the 32-year-old, a regular part in EastEnders plus a tidy sideline in celebrity ice-skating shows would sound about right.

But while he was dodging cybermen, he was also starring in Kidulthood. Written by Clarke, Kidulthood was released in 2006 and went on to be one of the year’s most talked-about British films. At times smart and funny, at times bleak and frightening, it condensed the urban teenage experience into 24 hours with an ensemble cast, based in Clarke’s native Ladbroke Grove and replete with pre-GCSE drug use, pregnancy, vicious bullying and, ultimately, a violent death.

“I had a lot of comments from people saying, ‘This stuff doesn’t happen,’” he says, evenly. “Some distributors didn’t believe the material, and didn’t think there would be an audience. But people went to see it. It was one of the Top Ten British films of 2006, and that’s because it captured an audience who either identified with it, or wanted to understand what teenagers today faced. I was invited to the Cheltenham Literature Festival after writing it, and I had teachers telling me that, now, they study Kidulthood in their citizenship classes,” he smiles. “And this is in Cheltenham.” Who knows, perhaps the newly released sequel, Adulthood, will also enter the curriculum.

But Kidulthood did have its detractors, who suggested that it glamorised violence and “happy slapping”. The only criticism that still riles Clarke came, he says, from a Daily Mail writer.

“He said that it was unrealistic and ‘pandered to middle-class voyeurism’,” he says. “So does that mean middle-class people shouldn’t watch the news, about people suffering, because it’s voyeurism? But the truth of the matter is this,” he says, leaning forward. “I used to work at a gym in Kensington, and I was this guy’s [the writer’s] gym instructor. I literally used to wipe his sweat off the machines, but eight years later, I was making films and he was in the same job.”

And he was annoyed about it? “Yeah, he was annoyed about it. To me, his comments seemed a personal thing.”

It’s an anecdote that reveals a lot about what drives Clarke, though the writer in question is actually Kevin Maher, who wrote that piece for The Times. Maher certainly remembers Clarke from those days – though Clarke was never his instructor – and says, “He was this sweet, lovely guy who once cried when he read my wife’s wedding speech after finding it in the gym. I hated Kidulthood because it smacked of phoney machismo and urban posturing – the kind of movie he thought he had to make, rather than the one he could, and still could. And when I called him on it, I think it was painful, and he took it personally.”

Clarke doesn’t have a drama school background. His mother arrived from Trinidad in 1969, and worked as a paediatric nurse at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, for more than 30 years. A single parent (his father, he states simply, “wasn’t around”), she’d drag him to church on Sundays. “She was a disciplinarian, but she taught me well: ‘Treat everyone you meet with respect until they’ve shown you that they don’t deserve it… And, even then, turn the other cheek if you can.’ I’ve never been in any trouble,” he stresses, explaining that the events in Kidulthood were more observational than autobiographical. “I got into mischief, but no police ever knocked on my mum’s door. I don’t have a record, I don’t smoke, I don’t really drink and I’ve never done drugs. All that stems from my mum.”

Throughout school and his time studying media at the University of North London, Clarke maintained the interest in acting he’d held since the age of five, when he “just wanted to be with the characters” of programmes such as, funnily enough, Auf Wiedersehen Pet and Dr Who. While working as a leisure centre lifeguard, he was spotted by the director of an in-development sitcom that would go on to be Metrosexuality and air in 2001. Cast as Kwame, the 17-year-old central character, he left university to act full-time, and attended classes at London’s Actors Centre well into his television career.

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