It’s getting on for 30 years since Robert Lindsay played Wolfie in the classic television comedy Citizen Smith. Since then he has been a regular face on British television. Naturally enough he supposed that someone might one day provide him with a Winnebego — the big American recreation vehicles in which celebrities are pampered on location.

They didn’t, so he bought himself one — a Laika motorhome. “Okay, it’s a sort of mini-Winnebago,” he says. “I won’t call it a caravan, but my family have come up with the rather camp name of a Caravilla.”

It is clear he is already very fond of the Italian vehicle. “It’s got a Fiat engine and five gears. It’s quite powerful and you don’t feel you’re holding up all the traffic behind you. We bought it in the spring after I finished my new series, Jericho, so that’s what it’s been nicknamed.”

Lindsay is the first to admit, however, that Jericho (five gears or not) would hardly go down very well in acting circles where the size of trailer is linked to the billing of the star inhabiting it. “The Americans in particular are so hung up on their status symbols that they even audition Winnebagos to see whether they’re suitable,” he says.

“When I did the film Fierce Creatures for John Cleese, I was in a modest trailer in a field next to Michael Palin and there was this knock on the door from Nicole Kidman’s secretary. She took one look at it, and said, ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ and walked out.”

Lindsay grew up in a working-class mining community heavily reliant on buses and had left home by the time his joiner father could afford his first car, a Simca, in the 1960s.

As a struggling actor he would rent motors to get him to performances around the country, but one journey he remembers is a 1974 trip to Marrakesh in Morocco — Mecca of the alternative lifestyle — in an old Renault 11 he had bought. “That was my hippie period,” explains Lindsay.

“There were no problems until Tunis, when I came out of the lodging house and found the car seats and steering wheel had been stolen, leaving just the bare bones of the car behind. I had very long hair at the time, so the Moroccan police weren’t too helpful and told me it was my own fault for leaving it on the street.

“I got two orange boxes and two pieces of wood to act as a steering wheel, which I tied together with string, and drove the car onto the ferry back to Spain. Which caused major consternation at the other end, because the police there thought I had driven this wooden contraption through north Africa.”

Continued on page two...()Another purchase, a Fiat sports saloon, was even more ill-fated. He parked it in an area prone to flooding. “I was filming a TV series near Teddington Lock and I had parked next to the river without reading warning notices. When I came out of makeup, the car was no longer there — it was under the river. Two guys in a canoe came along and said, ‘Do you own this Fiat?’ And of course I’d left the sunroof open, which made it sink quicker.”

In the public’s mind at least, the vehicle he’s most associated with is the Lambretta on which Wolfie Smith would scoot towards a Tooting revolution that somehow never quite happened in the BBC1 sitcom Citizen Smith (“although if Wolfie had been given a Bentley, he’d have taken it”).

Nowadays he travels in grander style. He drives a BMW X5 — though not in London, as he is keen to point out. “The Sunday Times outed me in a piece about so-called celebrities driving 4x4s. I do drive a 4x4, but I would now like to make it known that I do not drive my BMW X5 in central London and I very rarely drive my kids to school in it. I usually use the Mini for that.”

Why a Mini? “We are very environmentally minded and I like the smallness of it,” he says. “Because we have to zip into town quite a lot it’s easily parked and very economical.”

The X5 may soon make way for a more environmentally friendly estate car, but you can’t help but feel the perception of 4x4 drivers as being status-symbol-obsessed yuppies has also got to him. “The X5 is the splashiest car I’ve had. I love cars for what they are. I never bought a certain type of car in order to impress a girl; I have other attributes, darling. If it’s the car that grabs them then you might as well give up.”

In his latest role Lindsay drives a lovingly preserved 1950s Humber. “The Humber has two huge three-seater sofas in the back and front. It left you feeling rather big and proud,” he says. “And those sleek lines instantly made you feel more glamorous; you can’t get into one in shorts and flip-flops. It somehow demands a suit.”

Recently he has begun to desire an Aston Martin. “I took one for a test drive and I was like Toad of Toad Hall, going ‘Poop-poop!’” he says. “The new DB9 is the model I crave — an absolutely staggering piece of equipment. Most of the cars I buy now are based on what we need as a family. But I do have this big desire to drive on my own back to Marrakesh one day in an Aston Martin — with a Gucci suitcase and a rather smart suit.”

Citizen Smith eat your heart out.

On his CD changer

Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones and Beatles as well as jazz — which I’m passionate about. But my favourite album has to be Dark Side of the Moon, by Pink Floyd. You can tell I’m an old hippie

Explore Features

• Porsche

• BMW

• Mercedes

• Ferrari

• Bentley

• Audi

• Maserati

• Aston Martin

• Jaguar

• VW