What´s former Hollywood musical star Russ Tamblyn doing in 'Twin Peaks', the cult US series starting on BBC2 tonight? Huw Rossiter went to find out.

You only peak twice!

WEST SIDE STORY was never like this. Those were veteran actor Russ Tamblyn´s thoughts while filming a scene for Twin Peaks, the cult American "soap noir" which makes its eagerly awaitecd debut on BBC2 on Tuesday, October 23 (9pm).

The 56-year-old Californian, who starred in the 1961 hit musical West Side Story, was musing on the suggestion from Twin Peaks director David Lynch that he should "think about ghosts" while delivering his lines.

"It was such a wild piece of direction because the scene had nothing whatsoever to do with ghosts," recalls Tamblyn, in London to launch the series that has been the talk of America this summer.

"It put the scene in a strange new context which is exactly the effect David wanted to create."

Tamblyn, who plays the crazed "psychedelic shrink" Dr Lawrence Jacoby in Twin Peaks, was to grow accustomed to his director´s unusual approach.

Lynch, the man behind such films as The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, wanted Twin Peaks "to be totally different from any other TV drama".

And different it certainly is. It has been described as "Peyton Place meets Salvador Dali", a surreal soap opera packed with riddles.

Why, for example, is there a fish in the coffee pot? Who is the lady carrying the log? What is the meaning of the dwarf who talks backwards? And, most intriguing of all, who killed Laura Palmer?

David Lynch and his partner Mark Frost, a Hill Street Blues scriptwriter, have created the mist-shrouded saw-mill town of Twin Peaks, where the locals are buzzing following the murder of high school prom queen Laura Palmer.

It is a drama populated with the strangest set of characters ever to feature in a TV series.

What´s more, they are all murder suspects in a saga filled with cryptic dialogue and filmed in cinema.style detail amid lush scenery near the Canadian border.

Picking Russ Tamblyn - "buoyant American dancer and tumbler" according to one film guide - for Twin Peaks was an inspired piece of casting.

For what could be more surreal than this former Tom Thumb star playing the crazed psychiatrist Dr Lawrence Jacoby, a man who gets a sexual thrill from listening to his patients´ problems?

The role has provided Tamblyn with "the biggest challenge of my career", adding, "I could hardly see straight when they offered me the part."

He is first glimpsed in the 90-minute Twin Peaks opener telling a couple of nurses about the "talking fish" he had encountered on a fishing trip.

"Is that bizarre or what!" Exclaims Tamblynm the wide-eyed boyish face that made him a natural for such MGM musicals as Seven Brides For Seven Brothers still lurking behind his grizzled grey beard.

"That wasn´t in the script. But David Lynch suggested I use the line because it happened to him. He remembered catching a fish and how its mouth was opening and closing as if it was talking. It´s such a wonderful image.

Kyle MacLachlan as FBI Agent dale Cooper and Michael Ontkean as Sherrif Harry S. Truman in a scene from Twin Peaks

Russ Tamblyn, once the star of glittering Hollywood musicals like West Side Story and Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, proves an inspired addition to the cast of Twin Peaks.