Nobody could accuse the actor Bob Hoskins of vanity. "The closest thing I know about my appearance is my chin when I shave in the morning," he says. "I'm not obsessed with youth. I was born old."

Now 55, he claims to be unworried by the advancing years. "I'm not like they are in Los Angeles. They never see the years passing by there because there are no seasons, so they're obsessed with youth."

Hoskins has spent a lot of time in the American film capital, but this week he is home to blow the trumpet for TwentyFourSeven (see review, facing page), a film by Nottingham's rising writer-director, 25-year-old Shane Meadows. While Hoskins claims he felt a certain empathy with Meadows because of their physical resemblance - "he's 5ft 6in, cubic with a shaved head" - what really drew him to the project was the young man's talent.

For several years now Meadows has been making short films on video around the streets of Nottingham using his friends as actors. Two of them, Smalltime and Where's The Money Ronnie, received a limited commercial release last year, and caught the attention of producers Stephen Woolley and Nik Powell, who decided to back Meadows's first full-length feature. They then discovered that Meadows had written the lead with Hoskins in mind.

"They sent me one of Shane's videotapes and I was bowled over," the actor remembers. "Then they showed me the script and I was just amazed at this young guy's insight, compassion and wonderful love of people. Usually you accept a project and then you do your best. But sometimes along comes a project that has chosen you and is asking for far more than your best and the only thing you can do if you've got any sense is surrender. That was TwentyFourSeven."

The story is set in and around a Nottingham housing estate in the late Eighties, where both older and younger generations are living lives of barren despair with no hope of employment. Hoskins plays Alan Darcy, a middle-aged unemployed man who is determined to give the local youths a sense of purpose and physical challenge by reviving the boxing club of his own youth.

"The character's a brilliant study of loneliness," explains Hoskins. "On the outside he's this boisterous, tough guy who has the ability to get hold of young kids and make them into fighters, but inside there's this crippling loneliness. He'd make a wonderful father and husband but, like so many people, he just doesn't know how to handle himself in a sexual situation, like chatting up a bird, and he's going to wind up a lonely old man."

Hoskins knew deprivation in his youth, growing up in the postwar days of rationing in a two-roomed flat in Finsbury Park, where the bath was in the kitchen. But as he points out, when he was a young man there was work, there was hope and there was fun. "These kids have only known unemployment and the Conservatism that destroyed that groundwork of hope."

It seems fair to argue that Hoskins's commitment to TwentyFourSeven was instrumental in getting the film made, although he maintains that Meadows's talent would have won through with or without him. With regard to another project, however, which Hoskins originated and personally nurtured for the last five years, he is suffering a considerable degree of disappointment. The Secret Agent, based on the Joseph Conrad novel, of which he was both executive producer and star, opened and closed last month within a few days, despite some encouraging reviews and a strong cast.

"Fox put up the money for the film and I think they thought they were getting a cheap Victorian James Bond," he explains. "And then they didn't know what to do with it. Although the book has no sympathy for the characters at all, I thought if we could give the audience emotional access to these characters on film, you've got really brilliant classic tragedy like Oedipus. I think we did it really well."

Hoskins now has three more films in the pipeline. Cousin Bette, due to open in early autumn, is a costume piece based on a story by Balzac. Captain Jack is a gentle comedy written by Jack Rosenthal in the eccentric English realism tradition of Whisky Galore!. It is loosely based on the true life story of Whitby contemporary folk hero Jack Lammiman, who defied the authorities to take his battered old boat and a motley crew on a quest to the Arctic. And last month Hoskins finished shooting Live Virgin, an English-language French project made in America about the pornography industry in Los Angeles, in which Hoskins plays a porn producer, who wears what might be described as the tool of his trade tattooed on his forehead. "This is no Boogie Nights," he claims. "Nothing heavy. It's a real French farce."

Like his father, a communist and atheist who now lives with Hoskins and his wife Linda, the actor's politics are firmly to the left. And although he has reservations about new Labour, he is optimistic about a renaissance of true working-class culture.

"It's a bit early to tell. They don't seem to be shaping up too well so far but at least they're not getting in the way of the film industry, like Maggie Thatcher did. She thought all arts and drama in this country was leftwing, tried to send them the same way as the miners and virtually succeeded. For 20 years the culture of this country has been suppressed but now we've got rid of the Conservatives, it's going to come through, like grass through concrete.

"As far as the working classes are concerned, they've been a forgotten people. They've a very big tale to tell and now is the time for them to tell it. I think there's going to be a lot more films like TwentyFourSeven."