Richard Armitage likened the progress in his acting career to learning to drive, when he delivered his RTS Midlands Baird Lecture last month. He talked about the “ridiculous amounts of preparation” he put in to his one line on Boon and three lines in Casualty, but these put him in good stead for later roles.

He explained: “Learning to drive a banger is not such a bad thing because when you get behind the wheel of a Ferrari, you know what to do.

“I’ve always prepared every job as if it was a leading role. So when I got to the set of The Hobbit, with 500 people looking at me with that ‘Come on, what have you got?’ expression, I knew what to do, because I’d learned to drive in a banger.”

His preparation has included planting 200 trees in Tring for the Chekhov play Uncle Vanya and being waterboarded for Spooks because: “I just didn’t want to pretend what it was like. I wanted to experience it, if only for a few seconds.”

He was talking at the Baird Lectures, held to hear insights from the two talents, on and off screen, to whom RTS Midlands has awarded the prestigious Baird Medal.

The current holders are Armitage, who has starred in Red Eye, Obsession and Strike Back, and casting director Shaheen Baig. RTS Midlands Chair Kully Khaila described them as “titans of television with an amazing body of work”, while Armitage called himself and Baig “two working-class local kids made good”.

Armitage grew up in Leicestershire “as a timid, introverted kid and I still am – I’m faking my confidence. Acting still terrifies me. I always think it could be my last job and even now I squirrel away every penny.”

He added that he wants to audition to feel as if he has earned a role, although the exception seems to be the Harlan Coben thrillers adapted for Netflix. He has already starred in The Stranger, Stay Close and Fool Me Once and Missing You is out next year.

“When I was asked to do the second one, I didn’t even read the script, I just said yes. I described myself as the team’s lucky underpants, but writer Danny Brocklehurst said I’m the Sid James to the Carry On films.

“Harlan has taught me a huge amount about building plots,” said the author of two thrillers, Geneva and The Cut.

“They need to be as watertight as possible. On my first season of Spooks we had all the scripts, but by the third we started with only a page.

I was running up a staircase with Hermione Norris, saying: ‘We don’t know why we’re running.’ We were told: ‘There might be a helicopter on the roof, we’re not sure yet.’”

Birmingham-born Baig has cast everything from Peaky Blinders, Sherwood and Girl/Haji to episodes of Black Mirror and Boiling Point. She talked about being very conscious in the industry of her “class, heritage and regionality”, but is working to create opportunities and increase representation.

She told the RTS: “I care deeply about finding stories I can connect with, stories with integrity, film-makers that warrant nurturing and actors that deserve championing. Ultimately, the power of casting is with those who have the money. It’s my job to bring people into the room, to challenge and to keep suggesting people.

“I think the role of casting director has changed; we now come on to projects much earlier, sometimes when it’s still a synopsis. We’re almost like a producer, because by casting a certain actor we might greenlight a project and get it made.”

Baig raised the biggest laugh of the evening when she revealed her guilty TV pleasure was the “completely ridiculous” Emily in Paris. She explained: “I often work on quite heavy projects so I just want to watch stuff where I don’t have to use my brain. I watch a lot of Gone Fishing, Race Across the World – and Pingu.”

The Baird Lectures were held at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire on 20 September. They were hosted by Nikki Bedi and produced by Kully Khaila and Jayne Rae.