“That’s the guy from Bread, I recognise him...”

Top marks to the passer-by, it is indeed the guy from hugely popular Eighties TV sitcom Bread, Scouse rogue Freddie Boswell, sitting outside Costa in Rochester High Street.

To be precise it’s actor Ronald Forfar, and as fond as his memories of Bread are – “I remember hearing the letterbox one Monday morning; it was a cheque from the BBC” – he would like it known that he is not just the guy from Bread.

He is also the guy from Hamlet and the guy from Love’s Labour’s Lost too, and many more theatre productions besides.

He’s the guy from a working class Liverpool family, the “lowest of low” he describes them, who, miraculously blessed with perfect diction, got into grammar school and then joined the Navy before winning a place at RADA.

And he’s the guy that 25 years after disappearing from his most famous role and moving to France, has now resurfaced in Rochester, armed with his latest venture, a novel, A Wilderness of Monkeys.

So what else has been up to?

“Not a lot,” he says, in a stage accent about as far from Scouse as you can get. “I’ve been doing up my house – that’s what out-of-work actors do.

“This only took me six months to write.

“What happens to people after sitcoms?” he adds.

“By and large they disappear – they’re either not well known enough, or too well known. At the end of Bread I couldn’t walk down the High Street without people shouting at me.

“I wrote to 12 agents asking them if they would represent me, and only one replied. He said no.”

At 75, Ron Forfar could be bitter about a lot of things – about rejection by the TV industry; about a stage career that failed to skyrocket; or about 10 years spent in France before realising he didn’t like the French.

But bitter is one thing he doesn’t seem to be.

On returning to England eight years ago to find the house prices in London were too high, he moved to Rochester, a town he’d lived in as a clerk with the Navy, and “somewhere I felt at home.”

It was here that he fell back on his rich memories of the theatre to create his first substantial work of fiction; and it’s here that, buoyed by the achievement, he’s planning to write two more books.

“You just sit down at the laptop and give yourself a target of 1,000 words a day,” he says of the writing process.

“After three or four hours I stopped and I did something else for the rest of the day.”

It seems simple enough, but the modest approach has created a work which writer Anton Gill describes as “smashing!” with “wonderful turns of phrase” .

One thing seems for sure though – Freddie Boswell probably wouldn’t know what to make of it.

“He would say ‘What’s this load of crap?’ and throw it over his shoulder,” says Forfar. His plea to potential readers is to follow his lead and don’t be Freddie Boswell all your life.

You can find copies of A Wilderness of Monkeys by Ronald Forfar in Rochester Library or buy them for £5 from roebuckpress.co.uk.