'There's a good chance I could not have been here' – Liam Clayton

On August 4, 2009, 23-year-old Liam Clayton was driving home to Leicestershire after visiting friends in Kingston Upon Thames, when he was involved in a car crash that almost killed him. Doctors were forced to put him into a coma for three weeks while he received specialist care. Here, Liam talks about the night that would put his life on hold for a year...

“When I didn’t get home, my mum was starting to worry. She was on the phone to the local police number, trying to find out if there’d been any hold-ups on the motorway, and they were telling her that there hadn’t. Then the girl on the phone tells her that there’s been this accident, and starts talking about what the car was. At that point, some lights start coming up the drive and my mum realises it’s the police…

Interview: Daniel Hoffmann-Gill

The Nottingham-born actor talks about slumming it as a teen and the tragedy that made him turn his life around.

(Photo: Emilie Fjola Sandy)

Across the foyer of London’s Royal Festival Hall Daniel Hoffmann-Gill cuts an imposing figure. At 6ft 6in and thick cut, the actor, playwright and director is almost a giant. However, as he says goodbye to Rich, the designer for his upcoming play Our Style is Legendary, and scans the open-plan hall for his next appointment, I can’t help but think he looks like a lost child.

I approach Hoffmann-Gill, who is dressed in a scruffy wax jacket and baggy jeans, and am greeted with a handshake and a warm smile from behind a heavy moustache. It seems the lost boy analogy isn’t too far off as he tells me about his struggle growing up in Nottingham in the 1980s.