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Ex main squeeze of Mel B and best mate of Robbie Williams, Max Beesley's making waves in the Beeb's new medi drama Bodies. PHIL PENFOLD wields the scalpel

After the high-profile and publicity-fuelled affair with Melanie B, Max Beesley is keeping details of his new relationship strictly to himself. His family know the identity of his girlfriend, and so does his best mate Robbie Williams, and that's the way that Max, 32, wants to keep it.

"It's been going on for over four months now," he says, "she's an actress, we're both very happy, and that's all I want to say about it." Is this a totally new Max? A more settled and less frenetic one?

It certainly seems that way ­ he's taken up golf, he loves cooking and he's been helping the workmen putting the finishing touches to the conversion and restoration of his Hampton Court home.

After a slew of fairly undistinguished (though lucrative) movies, he's back doing what he claims to do best ­ quality drama for television. It was the BBC who gave Max his big break, back in the late nineties, when they picked him to play the roistering, rowdy and decidedly randy Tom Jones in the adaptation of Henry Fielding's classic novel. There wasn't much left to the imagination, as Tom brazenly bedded a bevy of beauties.

Then came a spell in Hollywood before Max returned to the BBC to play a young idealistic farmer, Mark Hurst, in a much praised conspiracy thriller. It was back to Hollywood again, followed by a year on the road, touring internationally with Robbie. Now he's home for the foreseeable future. And he's landed the lead role in a new BBC drama series Bodies (written by Jed Mercurio) opposite Tamzin Malleson, Neve McIntosh and Keith Allen. Max is Rob Lake, a doctor working in an inner city hospital's maternity unit, who suspects his new boss Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist Roger Hurley (played by Patrick Baladi) may be error-prone. "There are a lot of fireworks to come," he promises. Max has had his Hampton Court house for a few years now, but with being away so much, has done little to it until fairly recently. "I've just put in a new bathroom. I've got a great bunch of lads working for me. Even my dad came down to help out. He did a bit of plastering work ­ and he did it superbly. He hadn't picked up a plasterer's trowel for a quarter of a century, so the results were quite something. I'm OK-ish as a handyman, I suppose, but when I get involved the guys generally point out that they take four steps forward, and my 'help' takes them five steps back. I'm better off keeping out of their way and putting the kettle on!"

Not that he's had a lot of time in recent months to assist (or hinder) the building works. Bodies has taken up most of his time. It's been filmed entirely on location at a grim, grey stone Victorian pile which used to be a mental hospital (and has also housed the criminally insane) in Menston, just outside Leeds.

"Believe me," says Max, perching on a wall on the lawns of the old institution, as he takes a break, "it's gloriously sunny today, and a real treat to be out. But we've been here for the grimmest part of the winter, and it has been not only VERY cold and wet, but it's also a sinister place. There are a lot of memories locked into these walls. I went on a recce before we started work and I found the old hospital church. On one of the walls was a plaque which commemorated the two thousand and more souls who died while they were patients. That covered the time from the moment the place opened, about 100 years ago, to the day it closed a few years back. You couldn't help but feel terribly, terribly sorry for them."

"Bodies," says Max, "is definitely the hardest thing I have ever done. First, there's the technical side to the surgery that we're seen doing on screen. You have to make it look right. Otherwise you're betraying every surgeon out there who may be watching. I don't want to hear them saying 'Bloody nonsense, they didn't get that right'!"

"Then," he adds, "there are all the technical terms that we have to use. You try reading the word 'cricothyrotomy' for the first time and see if you can get it right. It has to roll happily off the tongue as if it were perfectly natural. No wonder the patients haven't got a clue what doctors are talking about sometimes!

"The workload for this series has been massive and it's also been very stressful. I did have initial qualms ­ like did I really want to be in yet another TV hospital drama? And did I really have the right to play this part? But then I remembered that De Niro always says you have to be true to every role that you play, whatever the rest of the film or drama may be like, and I realised that I could do that here.

"Basically, I love acting because it takes you into so many realms, and this was another one for me to take on. It helped that an old boyfriend of my Mum's (they went out when he was a young student doctor) is now high-up in the NHS. He'd always told me that if I ever wanted assistance with anything medical I was doing, to get in touch. I did, and he opened up a lot of doors for me. You know something? The funny thing was that the thing that truly impressed me was not the technical side of the job, but the way that doctors are all humans, and that they have to take a break and relax, like anyone else. I liked watching the real doctors in the canteen, for example, reading their golf magazines or holiday brochures while having a cup of tea. It's like 'another day at the office' for some. But I talked to one young doctor over a cup of tea one day and she told me that she'd never ever been in the canteen before ­ she'd never had the time, she was always too busy! Oh, and I've watched a lot of the Trauma series on The Discovery Channel, as well. Very helpful!"

No wonder Beesley is always found, when the breaks come around, out on the lawns practising his golfing shots. The rare visitors to the set have chuckled at the sight of the six-footer, still in the costume of pale green surgeon's scrubs, whacking balls into the middle distance.

He's either doing that, or constantly rereading his battered copy of a biography of the actor Robert De Niro, whom Max idolises. "Look at the state of this," he says ruefully, examining the torn spine and the chewed covers of the hardback. "Bloody Robbie's dog did this... little bugger!" Then he shifts along the wall swiftly, as a stray insect sidles up to him. "OhmiGod," he says, obviously thrown, "I hate things like that. I cannot stand creepie-crawlies in any shape or form, I really hate them. I can do incredibly complicated surgery, getting inside all sorts of prosthetic things that look so real you won't believe they're not ­ but I can't stand a little thing like that. What's wrong with me, eh?

"Yes," he admits, "there may be a few things in Bodies that viewers find shocking. Quite apart from the medical stuff, my character does have a very intense and very personal affair with one of his colleagues. Those raunchy, sexually explicit scenes (they're with Neve) are never easy to do. But we get on very well on a personal level ­ if we didn't, scenes like that would be a nightmare! But it's NOT any of that out-of-context rubbish, bare bums for the sake of it, shoved in for gratuitous effect. When Mercurio has written in a love scene, it's there for a damned good reason. The intensity of the medical action might have one or two doctors raising an eyebrow, but there's nothing in the scripts that hasn't happened. It's just that you have to take a little dramatic licence by compacting things somewhat.

"We have expert advisors on the set daily, and they've been marvellous in correcting any mistakes we've made. I've been constantly going up to them saying, 'Was that all right? Because if it wasn't, tell me ­ I don't want to look a fool', and I'll always ask for a reshoot if needs be.

What's Rob Lake like? Well, he's an honest guy, a little bit of a loner, and he becomes a whistleblower because he feels he must expose Hurley's negligence. In so doing, he risks his career. He's really on his own in a lot of ways."

Max says that he looks forward to meeting other actors and working with them and the crew. "I've generally walked away from a set having made a couple of good mates and I know that I'll keep in touch with them for many years to come. There are some, I won't name them, where I just have to bite my tongue and say nothing, and I have to be as professional as I can be. After all, it's my livelihood and I can't be a martyr."

Burnage-born Max (his mother is jazz singer Chris Marlowe and his father is jazz drummer and character actor Maxton Beesley ) went to Cheetham's School of Music in Manchester. He was also a choirboy in Manchester Cathedral.

In the past five years, he's made fifteen movies ­ some of which have still to be released, nearly all of which have vanished without trace or which are still lurking at the bottom of the straight-to-video bin in your local rental store. Films like The Last Minute, Five Seconds to Spare and Hotel.

"I am still," he says emphatically, "learning my craft and my trade. No one makes a movie knowing that it's going to be a disaster, or wilfully wanting it to be one. But you sometimes do a studio film, with a decent budget, but too many executives involved, meddling away in the background. And while you've liked the original script, what you end up with is a one-dimensional piece that no one is happy with. They seem to bleed all the good bits out, sometimes, in a series of compromises. The more 'suits' involved, the worse it gets.

"But I've worked with some of my heroes, which is always a compensation. Like Malcolm MacDowell in Red Roses and Petrol which had a brilliant screenplay. Mike Figgis (the director) opened my eyes to what could be done on screen with digital cameras in Hotel."

And music has come back into the forefront of Max's life in recent months. Not only did he star in The Emperor's Wife, but he also co-wrote the score. "I asked the producers if I could play them some themes and they obviously thought, 'Go ahead, we'll humour him', but they clearly liked what they heard, and the score ended up winning a major music award at the Rome Film Festival last year! We were chuffed about that! I'd love to do more, and yes, in ten years time, I'd also like to be directing.

"Getting involved with the music was very interesting because the way a composer looks at a movie is a different way to that of an actor. The funny thing that happened was that I ran the movie for a mate of mine ­ he didn't know that I'd been involved with the score ­ and he sat back and said 'Shame about the music'!

"I jumped up and said 'WHAT?????', and he explained that what he meant was that he loved it ­ and it would be a pity if the film didn't do well 'cos no one would hear it!"

After Bodies, Max is going to take two months off, "chilling out," and then "there's maybe a second series, and the BBC are also perhaps going to offer something else. I've just looked at two things and turned them down, because the writing really wasn't up to much. The last few years have taught me, I think, to be a lot more objective about scripts. There's still a gap in the market that I think I can fill as an actor.

"And I've been doing a lot of exercise as well. Boxing with a former professional as a trainer. Now that does keep you fit. Trouble is I can't do too much of it when I'm filming. The insurance people don't take too kindly to me turning up with a set of injuries and bruises ­ the best way I've found is not to tell them!"

Does he miss the days of touring with the likes of Take That? "No. I've been through the groupie thing and I've got it out of my system. There was a lifestyle that was expected in that business ­ drink and drugs and the young ladies. I was a bit of a philanderer. True but sad. But then, as you grow older, you realise that it's all very shallow indeed and that the nature of the business is extremely fickle. I'm not into the social scene now, and all the other things are well behind me. It's just so...knackering!"