One day in 1957, Melvyn Hayes was on the set of a film called Woman in a Dressing Gown when a man sat down next to him. “I was getting paid £5 a day and I’d been on location for three days,” the actor recalls. “All I had to do was walk up to a house and put a newspaper through a letterbox. That was my part. Finished. I said to this bloke, ‘I can’t believe the waste of money on this film. Take me. You could have got a newspaper boy on £1 a day to do what I’m doing.’ Then I said, ‘What do you do then, you lazy bugger?’ And he said, ‘I’m the producer.’”

Hayes, now 89, giggles at the memory of the cheek of himself at 23. Back then, £5 a day was a decent whack. His first job in showbiz, in the early 1950s, was as assistant to The Great Masoni, a magician who tasked Hayes with “disappearing twice daily for £4”. His chief film role so far had been in the 1955 drama documentary The Unloved, in which he played a boy in a home for delinquent kids.

The producer sitting next to Hayes, Frank Godwin, was struck by his chutzpah. Godwin was looking for an actor to play a cockney tearaway in his next picture, No Trees in the Street, and he realised he might have found him. But there was a problem: the character of Tommy – an impoverished teenager who descends into criminality, murdering a sweet old pawn-shop proprietor after she only offers him 12/6 for a jacket – was supposed to be 18. “So,” says Hayes, “I lied to get the part.”

The director, J Lee Thompson, gave Hayes the role after a screen test opposite Sylvia Syms. Syms had lit up the 1958 classic Ice Cold in Alex, playing Sister Diana Murdoch, the nurse who memorably defrosts captain John Mills’s ardour in the midst of Britain’s retreat from Tobruk to Alexandria during the second world war.

In No Trees in the Street, Syms exchanged stifling desert locations for suffocating East End interiors, playing the strait-laced sister to ingenue Hayes’s delinquent teen. “I couldn’t believe I was with all these great stars,” says Hayes now. Besides Syms, there was Herbert Lom as a crooked bookie and Stanley Holloway as a down-at-heel professional gambler. “All those incredible actors!” says Hayes. “I’d arrived – or I thought I had.”

Today, Hayes is known chiefly for his role in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, the sitcom that, between 1974 and 1981, attracted up to 17 million viewers a week, but has been airbrushed from BBC schedules for its perceived racism and homophobia. He was cross-dressing Gunner “Gloria” Beaumont, an effete member of a concert party of British squaddies stationed in India during the second world war.

However, back in the 1950s, Hayes was preparing to be a dramatic lead. Had Thompson only brought the sentiment-free approach to No Trees in the Street that he later deployed so effectively in the 1962 thriller Cape Fear, starring Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck, Hayes might have found himself a global star. It didn’t happen – partly, he thinks, because the director was insufficiently ruthless with the moralising script. “After we finished shooting,” says Hayes, “Thompson said to me: ‘I think I made a mistake. I should have made you the first star of an ‘angry young man’ picture.’”

We’re talking because No Trees in the Street is being screened next weekend at the Cinema Rediscovered festival in Bristol. Hayes is taking along no fewer than 17 members of his family. The screenplay – by Ted Willis, adapted from his own play – starts with a young scamp running across an old bomb site. The year is 1958 and the boy, played by a very young David Hemmings, collides with an old copper, who finds the kid is carrying a switchblade and gives him a clip round the ear. We then cut to these same streets 20 years earlier, as that copper recalls what this manor was like before the Luftwaffe levelled it.

Thompson conjures up that 1938 scene eloquently. Fascist troublemaker Oswald Mosley’s name hasn’t quite been whitewashed from the walls, there’s a thriving Jewish grocery store and a billboard tells us the Czechs are mobilising. “I loved the way J Lee shot the East End of the 1930s,” says Hayes. “It’s teeming with life and all those Jewish shops that don’t exist now.”

Some of the most poignant scenes involve Hayes, weedy in a sleeveless jumper, being thrashed by his mother for not getting a proper job, or for hungrily tearing into a crust of bread. He’s a little boy with a vulnerable face trying to act tough and, near the bitter denouement, holes up from the cops like Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon. Hayes could’t have been happier on set. “I had a chair with my name on it. I didn’t dare sit on it!” When the producers found out he was driving to the shoot in what amounted to a toy car, they got him a proper one. The film’s opening credits included the words: “Introducing Melvyn Hayes.”

Hayes still remembers the review that ran in the Evening News singling him out. “It said: ‘This is the face that will hold you in 1959.’” The suggestion was that he was going to be a star, perhaps joining the ranks of Richard Burton, Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney who were reviving British cinema with gritty realist films. “I had to ring them up a few months later to tell them that didn’t happen.”What does Hayes think of his performance now? “I played the role for the truth of it, for the reality. It must have worked somewhere, because a wonderful director called Mario Zampi got in touch and said: ‘You’re just going to be offered dramatic parts from now on. So before you pack up comedy, do this one film for me.” The film was Bottoms Up!, a spin-off of Whack-O!, a sitcom about an alcoholic, swindling, sadistic teacher, who takes pleasure in caning his students, until they decide to rebel.

Bottoms Up! was a flop. “I rang up the manager of the cinema in Clapham,” Hayes recalls, “saying that I was in Bottoms Up! and asking for a couple of complimentary tickets. He said, ‘The place has been empty all week, so I don’t think so.’”

Nor did Hayes gravitate towards dramatic roles. Instead, he joined pop legend Cliff Richard’s cheerful 1960s foray into film, starring opposite Una Stubbs and others in The Young Ones, Summer Holiday and Crooks in Cloisters. Rather than an angry young man he became the cheeky chappie of the swinging 60s.

Hayes next landed a part in Here Come the Double Deckers! He played the grown-up minder of a bunch of kids who lived in a London bus (one of whom was Brinsley Forde, later frontman for reggae combo Aswad). Then came It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. Hayes beat John Inman – the future star of Are You Being Served? – to the role of Gloria. “John would have been great,” says Hayes. “He was a wonderful actor.”

Hayes is angry about how the show has been treated by the BBC. “They could have bleeped things out, or put up some disclaimer. But to take it off air and treat it as an object of shame was just wrong.” Nor does he agree that it was racist. This is not an opinion that was shared by the late sociologist Stuart Hall, who included it in It Ain’t Half Racist, Mum, his programme about TV’s lamentable depictions of people of colour. One of the sitcom’s characters, Rangi Ram, was played by a white actor called Michael Bates in brownface. Hayes points out that not only was Bates a fluent Urdu speaker, but the sitcom was also admired by Britons of Asian ancestry. “Asian people would describe it to me as ‘our show’, partly because it was the only one where you’d hear any Urdu.”

Hayes was last seen doing a cameo in the Lee Mack-fronted sitcom Not Going Out in 2023. He is now devoting his energies to finishing his autobiography. “It’s only taken me 36 years.” What’s it called? “It’s Taken Me a Long Time. Actually, it’s got a second title.” What? “If You Ain’t Got Your Socks.” Why? “Because my dad used to say to me, ‘Remember son, if you ain’t got your socks, you can’t pull them up.” Sage advice. “I really wrote it so my children would know what I’ve done for a living, to explain why I wasn’t often at the school gate.”

Hayes has six kids from three marriages, hence the large contingent attending the No Trees in the Street screening. “I haven’t seen it for years,” he says. “I remember Herbert Lom, such a sweet man, saying to me years after we made it, ‘Remember No Trees in the Street, Melvyn? You were great.’” Hayes pauses then says: “I wonder if I was. I suppose I’ll find out.”

• No Trees in the Street is screening at Watershed, Bristol, on 28 July and out on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital on 5 August

• This article was amended on 23 July 2024. The photograph of Melvyn Hayes between Cliff Richard and Una Stubbs is from Wonderful Life, not Summer Holiday as an earlier version said.