Actor Peter Capaldi has revealed how he was once arrested – on suspicion of being involved with a bomb explosion.

The Doctor Who and The Thick Of It star says he was a teenager at the time.

Asked by The Guardian newspaper about his closest brush with the law, Capaldi replied:

“In 1975, in York (I must have been 17): there was a bomb explosion.

“It was 3am, I was with some pals and we were picked up by the police who, hearing our Scottish accents, seemed to connect us to the explosion.

“We were taken in for questioning, which was scary, but it didn’t take them long to suss out these fey youngsters were incapable of a bomb plot.”

The Press has been unable to verify which bomb explosion he was referring to.

There were a series of bomb attacks in Yorkshire in the mid 1970s as the Provisional IRA stepped up its terror campaign in England - including one on Strensall barracks. These were in 1974, however, not 1975.

On February 4, 1974, a coach taking servicemen and their families from Manchester to Catterick Garrison and RAF Leeming was blown up on the M62 at Batley, killing 12 people, including several little children.

The rear of the coach was blasted apart, with bodies thrown on to the road and wreckage strewn for 200 yards. 

Less than two months later, on March 26, terrorists struck at dawn in the heart of North Yorkshire when the Claro Barracks at Ripon were hit by three bombs.

Two stores and the main NAAFI building were damaged, and another device was then destroyed in a controlled explosion by army bomb disposal experts in the main barracks, where 100 soldiers had been sleeping. A 49-year-old person suffered facial cuts from flying glass during the attack.

Three months later, on June 11, the barracks at Strensall were the next to be targeted by bombers.

Most of the Green Howards Band's musical instruments were destroyed in the blast.