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Toby Jones is one of the favourites to win a National Television Award after taking on the title role in the hit ITV drama Mr Bates vs Post Office.
The actor garnered huge praise for his portrayal of former subpostmaster Sir Alan Bates, who helped bring legal action against the Post Office. He is nominated in the drama performance category with competition from Brenda Blethyn, Jessica Gunning, Michelle Keegan and Vicky McClure.
It was announced last week that the ITV drama had been awarded the NTA Impact Award for creating a “huge cultural shift”. Toby previously won wide acclaim for his portrayal of Stoke City kit-man Neil ‘Nello’ Baldwin in the BAFTA-winning Marvellous.
But what some Stokies don’t realise is that Stoke City fan Toby has very strong connections to Stoke-on-Trent and regularly returns to visit loved-ones.
His links go back to his Potteries-born father, Freddie Jones, who was also a renowned actor and had an illustrious career in TV, theatre and film for five decades before his death in July 2019, aged 91.
Freddie was born and raised in Dresden, one of two sons of Charles Jones, an electrical porcelain thrower and his wife, Ida (nee Godwin), and attended the nearby grammar school in Longton, which, according to his obituary, he hated.
As a boy scout, he appeared in a show at the old Theatre Royal in Hanley. On leaving school, Freddie worked at Creda, the home appliances store, in Blythe Bridge and then as a lab assistant with the British Ceramic Research Association, in Penkhull.
(Image: ITV)
He quit his last lab job because of a ‘ban on beards’ and instead turned to acting. He immersed himself in amateur dramatics at the old Shelton rep and other companies around Stoke.
After attending Rose Bruford college, he broke into TV in the early 60s with roles in Z-Cars and The Victorians.
He made regular appearances in David Lynch films, playing Bytes in The Elephant Man (1980), Thufir Hawat in Dune (1984) and George Kovich in Wild at Heart (1990). He also worked steadily on TV and it was his role in Emmerdale in later years that he was perhaps best known for; playing Sandy Thomas in the long-running soap. Freddie filmed over 500 episodes of the soap, eventually leaving in 2018.
Despite bringing up his son Toby in Surrey, Freddie made sure to make regular visits north to see his relatives back in Stoke-on-Trent. It meant the Victoria Ground would soon become Toby’s second home.
Toby told StokeonTrentLive: “The team that captured my imagination was the 1975 team, the one that was robbed of a place in Europe. There was a rule that no two teams from the same city could go into Europe, but Everton appealed that when they and Liverpool qualified and they won, which meant Stoke missed out.
“I remember the injustice because that was a great Stoke team. Geoff Hurst was playing. It was quite extraordinary to have such a legend playing for your favourite team. Alan Hudson was obviously a hero as well, then there was Greenhoff, Conroy, Salmons, Shilton, Pejic.
“My godfather, Peter Haynes, used to do the hospital radio commentaries and he took me along to my first game at the Victoria Ground, a 5-2 win over Birmingham, who had Trevor Francis playing for them. Afterwards he took me into the changing rooms and although I don’t think he was playing, John Ritchie was stood there like a giant in front of me.”
After being offered lead role in Marvellous, Toby returned to North Staffordshire to meet Nello. He said: “I read the script and was really moved by it, it was so unlike anything I’d been send or had read in a long, long time. It felt like one of those experiments on telly that Dennis Potter used to do.
“I accepted the part on the strength of the script, but my first request was to meet Neil as soon as I could and I went to Keele in December 2013. It was a challenge for me to play someone who was alive someone I had access to and someone who was also going to play an active part in the project. I remember feeling daunted.
“Also, a drama depends on something bad happening, but here was someone who had good things happen to him. The key fact was the communities of Stoke and Keele that Neil lives in because of their warmth, and because of their acceptance of the film crew was so positive.
“Suddenly, one began to understand why Neil has the life he has, because of an extraordinary warmth, not that this was a huge surprise because I’d seen it for myself before when visiting family and friends.”
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