David Banks is an actor, director, writer and specialist in computer software. He was born in 1951, the only son of fundamentalist Christian parents, and grew up in Hull. Major acting parts have been as the Cyberleader in the long-running TV series Doctor Who and in the soaps Brookside and Canary Wharf. His plays include Severance, and prose writings include a book on Cybermen and the novel Iceberg (Virgin 1993). He decided in his late teens that the Christian faith was not for him and has explored his own path through the Tarot, through Lao Tsu's Tao and the I Ching. He might now be described as meditative non-religious and practises T'ai Chi.
"Then my father says, 'And what side are you on?' and I say, 'I'm on the inside, you're on the inside, everybody's on the inside - except the Bad 'Uns!' Yet he wasn't made to feel a 'miserable sinner'? A Bad 'Un? "Not at all."
"There was a void in me which Jesus left. But the void is all right. It's not blackness or emptiness, it's more like the void before things were, and it seems to me that in that place everything is all right."