'We've bred a selfishness which is now endemic'

In a bid to help children at home and abroad, actor David Hayman set up his own charity. Now he is directing a film starring some of those he has helped.

Ever more frequently these days, David Hayman hears himself raging against materialism. In a sense it is his sternest role, not as an actor - there is no make-believe about it - but as an impassioned human being who believes that greed will be the end of us, those with plenty having maimed the world for themselves and everybody else.

It's an apocalyptic vision, and Hayman, if not exactly the firebrand pulpiteer, does possess something of the old-fashioned soapbox revolutionary for whom apathy is odious. "I try to be non-judgmental about what people do or don't do," he says, in a moment of light contrition. Then, thinking better of it, he adds: "You know, sometimes I wake up asking myself, Why the hell can't more of us see that the seconds are ticking towards midnight and we're close to the end?' But the problem is that we've bred a selfishness which is now endemic."

Almost seven years ago, Hayman launched the charity Spirit Aid, which aims to rescue children the world over. Staffed entirely by volunteers and operating out of modest offices in Glasgow, it has notched up some impressive achievements. Hayman - more familiar as the tobacco-gnarled detective Mike Walker in the long-running ITV drama Trial and Retribution - recites the list of Spirit Aid's ongoing projects: mobile clinics for the Hindu Kush mountain area of Afghanistan; an orphanage for HIV/Aids victims in one of South Africa's impoverished townships; the building of a fishing boat which provides work and food for 150 of Sri Lanka's tsunami survivors; equipment for a refuge sheltering war-damaged street children in Baghdad.

Closer to home, there is Shooters, the media and film programme Spirit Aid runs for youngsters from some of the most impoverished areas of Scotland. Over a four-month period, the participants acquire sufficient technical, scriptwriting and acting skills to produce a short film with a storyline of their choice.

On completing the course, they receive a certificate of merit along with an accredited environmental award named after the Scottish-American naturalist John Muir.

"Shooters brings together young people from different cultures, and that's been invaluable in breaking down barriers. But also, very rewardingly, it unleashes lots of new creative talent," says Hayman. Some of that will be seen in the feature film Wasted, which he is currently directing.

He reaches our meeting taut as a wire from rehearsals, which take the form of emotionally charged improvisation. The plot, he says, concerns two teenagers who eventually escape from the hellhole of every kind of abuse, by encountering love, trust and compassion for the first time in their lives.

"Kate Dickie, the star of Red Road, Gary Lewis, the father in Billy Elliot, and myself play the adults, but the two youngsters, Neil Leiper and Emma Hartley Miller, are real discoveries, and their performances are truly powerful and exciting," he says. "Essentially it's a love story set against a horrific backdrop, but it's also full of dignity, humour and hope."

Hayman's own acting career began at the Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow after he graduated from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Early roles included Hamlet and an exceptional Lady Macbeth, which he rates as one of the best performances he's ever given. "Actually, in the space of about two years I went from Lady Macbeth to Al Capone and Jimmy Boyle."

This reference to Boyle brings the conversation round to A Sense of Freedom, the controversial biopic of the notorious Glasgow career criminal who reformed to became a sculptor while serving life in Barlinnie for a murder he has always claimed he didn't commit. The movie was released in 1979 and, at the time, didn't win many friends among the Scottish press. "I don't believe the film glorified Boyle at all," says Hayman. "It did have an impact, though, with the likes of Ludovic Kennedy, penal reformers and politicians discussing on TV the nature of crime and punishment."

During the 1970s, TV cops-and-robbers still tended to revolve around Dixon of Dock Green and Z Cars. But A Sense of Freedom was cinema verite with a vengeance. "Suddenly you were watching the beast stripped naked, in a cage, in a cell, being beaten up by six hairies. For the audience there was no escape, either. No hiding place."

Hayman, craggy-featured, with commando-like compactness and agility, roams the world of conflict with stunning conviction as an actor. But the aggression he has witnessed in real life has made him a committed pacifist.

"I can sniff danger at 100 paces," he says. "When you've been brought up in Bridgeton and Drumchapel, you recognise it by instinct. But I've never believed that an act of violence takes us one step along the road of evolution."

He knows his aid missions mean anxious times for his wife, Alice, and sons, David, Sam and Sean. How do they cope with the fact he is often in perilous territory, confronting warlords or disease? "Alice does worry when I go to Afghanistan, but it's a country I adore, and even as a child I used to dream about it because it's so exotic. But I certainly couldn't have set up Spirit Aid if I didn't have her support. And Alice used to be in social work, so she's a tough cookie. She also knows that I take great care because I'm no use to man or beast if I'm lying in a ditch with a bullet in my head."

Hayman's approach to humanitarian relief revolves around building continuing partnerships with communities so as to know precisely what they need. Does he think smaller charities can be faster and more effective than the big international names?

"It's a thorny subject. I don't have a great deal of respect for the efficiency of large organisations and I would never wish to run one. That must be a nightmare. But the aid business has just gotten too big. There are shining examples - like Medecins Sans Frontieres - of how things should work, and the world would be a lesser place without them. But at the time of the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, the Disasters Emergency Committee, created by the big charities, sat on something like £350m in donations for far too long, and that to me was a disgrace."

Hayman says that, on his first trip to a strife-ravaged Kosovo, he saw a fleet of jeeps, trucks, ambulances and buses with charity livery in an army compound. "They were all brand new, all ready to go. Two months later I went back and no-one had turned a key in any one of those vehicles. Now, that just says to me that the system isn't working. We, on the other hand, could barely afford a truck."

What of the claim by established charities that the small ones can be a hindrance because they lack co-ordinated strategies? "I have never witnessed small organisations getting in the way of big ones. But I think we've gone beyond the stage where we chuck bags of rice out of a 747 just to keep a beleaguered village alive for another 10 days in abject poverty, pain and torture. If that's it, what's the point? I don't see that as a humanitarian gesture. That's a desperate gesture."

Spirit Aid, with running costs of £100,000 a year, is funded by voluntary donations. "Someone recently gave us a cheque for £20,000 for a specific project; another gave £6000 towards the provision of a second mobile clinic for Afghanistan, and I will bless them till the day I die." That extra facility, he says, has enabled medical personnel to reach mountain villages to examine 120,000 people, and, with an experienced paediatrician on hand, Spirit Aid has helped reduce child mortality in the area.

Against all this, does an actor's life remain Hayman's priority? "I still love the job of acting, but I've been disenchanted with the industry for a long time because it's now entirely driven by greed and ego." He won't give it up lightly, though - if only because he needs to earn a living. Yet the world, he says, has reached a point where we must all sacrifice something to make it a better place. "We talk about wanting a world of truth and justice and peace, but we never achieve it. Why? Because we sit on our backsides and do nothing."

If that sounds overly harsh, Hayman is unperturbed. He quotes a native American proverb belonging to the Sioux: "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children." What stronger, more beautiful incentive do we need, he wonders, to make us shed apathy and re-evaluate our lives?