An upwardly mobile phoney

It is difficult for Colin Firth, who takes up considerable space on our television screens, to see himself as others see him, principally because he does not own a television set. What might seem an insufferable affectation in other actors is somehow excusable in a man willing to say: ''I'm a complete phoney.''

This frank self-assessment has nothing to do with his refusal to join telesociety, but stems from the impression he conveys that, vocally and visually, he is a member of the upper classes. ''I failed my 11-plus,'' he says, ''and had a really dreadful education for the most part. Throughout my school life I talked with a broad Hampshire accent. Then I went to drama school and suddenly became a sort of English public schoolboy. It's actually got to the point when people say I'm trying to pull a fast one when I tell them I'm not what they think I am. ''You want to work and you tend to latch on to whatever identity people respond to. Then you urgently want to shake it off.''

Acting in both the play and film of Another Country, Julian Mitchell's exploration of public school life, did nothing to shake it; nor did his portrayal of officer Robert Lawrence in the BBC Falklands film, Tumbledown. His John McCarthy in Hostages was certainly no excuse to revert to rougher speech, any more than is his role in Master of the Moor, in which, for three weeks beginning next Friday he roams Dartmoor in a Ruth Rendell murder mystery which explores the equally uncertain terrain inhabited by good people who can be driven to dark deeds.

But it is his BBC role as the very superior Darcy, Jane Austen's hero in Pride and Prejudice that, whatever happens in the meantime, will, next year, firmly thrust him back into the upper-classes. And, if advance reports are anything to go by, a certain amount of notoriety. The passions that surge beneath frock-coat and crinoline were to be exposed; there would, it was said, even be scenes where frock coat and crinoline would be discarded along with the other cumbersome garments of the period. Someone, somewhere, uttered the word ''pornography''. ''I don't know where this stuff came from,'' Firth says. ''I probably overdid it a few weeks ago when I said that it was the most mundane, run-of-the-mill adaptation. But it is an utterly conventional rendering of Pride and Prejudice. There is nothing exceptionally sexual about it all. ''Nudity? So far no one has even removed a shirt. In fact I go for a swim after a long ride in one scene and remain fully clothed. ''What happened, I think, is that someone said they wanted it to be sexy. What they meant was the kind of sexuality that's in the book the sexuality of repression. When you read the book, you know that everybody's horny all that flirtation and dancing and conversation, but nobody's going to get laid.''

There is, in fact, a more interesting problem to overcome in playing Darcy, namely that millions of women have their own idea of what he looks like. ''There'll be people,'' Firth acknowledges, ''who will object strongly simply because it's my face instead of the one they have in their mind. Everyone believes he is dark, though I don't believe Jane Austen ever described him as such. So they've dyed me dark. ''You have to be very careful not to make him either too idiosyncratic or too bland, and the danger is that you don't dare to do anything at all. So you have to take over and say, 'To hell with it, he's mine now. I own this character and he has to be me.''' And that, except perhaps for the intemperate language, is very Darcyish.

Before Darcy, Firth will be seen in Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea, scheduled for the BBC's Performance series. He plays the charming, hopelessly inadequate, former wartime flying ace Freddie, with Penelope Wilton repeating her award-winning stage performance as the respectable Englishwoman who bolts with him. To see any of his television appearances he has to make special arrangements with his friends or visit his father. He gave up watching television eight years ago. ''Having a television set is a bit like going into a supermarket to buy a toothbrush and ending up with a trolley full of stuff you don't want. I know that life improved enormously once I got rid of it. I read more, went out more, listened to more music, more radio.

''If there is anything special, I go to a friend's house and I sit there with peanuts because it's like going to the cinema. It becomes something of an event. And that's what's missing from television.'' As Noel Coward said: ''Television is not for looking at, but for appearing on.'' He, too, gave every appearance of being public school, an officer and a  gentleman, when in fact he was an organ salesman's son who was born in Teddington. And was no more of a phoney than Firth is.