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Daily Mail
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Smack The Pony comedy troupe reunite over 20 YEARS after their Channel 4 series ended
The Smack The Pony comedy troupe are reuniting – more than 20 years after their comedy series ended on Channel 4. Fiona Allen, Doon Mackichan and Sally Phillips are reviving their comic sketches for the Edinburgh Fringe festival at the Gilded Balloon this summer. The three comedians say they have lots of new ideas for skits and can't wait to reunite 24 years after the show came off air. In a statement, the trio said: 'This is slightly surreal because it's 24 years since we finished. We're not old comedy, we now qualify as vintage, which is cool. Is it?' 'Because we always talk sketch ideas when we get together, on some level it's almost as if 'Smack the Pony' never really stopped - that it just kept going in some parallel universe. 'So it feels like Gilded Balloon is some kind of portal and we'll be popping into catch up with Series 26. We're very grateful to have this chance to hang out and take the p*** out of ourselves again - we've missed it!' Their show, titled Back in the Saddle, will also feature broadcaster Kirsty Wark and will be a look back at the TV series with classic sketches revisited as well as their new material. Smack The Pony - which was created by Victoria Pile, who also wrote surreal hospital sitcom Green Wing - ran on Channel 4 for three series from 1999 to 2002, and concluded with two specials broadcast over Christmas 2002 and New Year 2003. Back in 2019, 'Two Doors Down' actress Doon, 62, revealed in an interview with The i newspaper that the trio had written a host of fresh sketches for a potential TV comeback but executives were not interested in bringing back 'Smack The Pony'. She said: 'It's just been really difficult. We've pitched to a few places and it's not happening. 'I don't know whether it's [because it's] older women but it's not happening, which is, to me, astonishing. You think, how funny does it have to be? With the brand?' Doon, Fiona, 60, and Sally, 54, previously reunited for a sketch for Red Nose Day in 2017. Chris McCausland is not returning for a second series of his talk show. The Chris McCausland Show ran on ITV for 11 episodes and saw the stand-up comedian interview an array of celebrity guests, including Paul Whitehouse, Rob Beckett, Pixie Lott and more. The comic's publicist has released a statement revealing that Chris, 47, made the decision to walk away from the programme to pursue other projects. The 2024 Strictly Come Dancing winner has been inundated with work offers since becoming the first blind contestant to take home the Glitterball Trophy on the BBC One ballroom show. The publicist told comedy news website Chortle: 'It was Chris who stepped away from this show. It was a great experience but he's looking at other opportunities and there have been a lot of offers since 'Strictly'.' Chris' next confirmed project is a BBC Two documentary which will focus on how technology has changed the way he has been able to continue his life after losing his sight by age 22 due to the genetic condition retinitis pigmentosa. Seeing Into The Future will show Chris visiting Silicon Valley and investigating the latest technology helping people with blindness and severe sight issues. Chris will also be releasing his memoir later this year. Announcing the book in January 2025, he said: 'I thought 'Strictly' was terrifying but my book has a release date and I haven't started writing it yet.
The Guardian
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Stephen Mangan: ‘With three people in a bed, who goes in the middle?'
Stephen Mangan, 56, was born in Enfield to Irish parents. He studied law at Cambridge but took a year out to care for his mother, who died of colon cancer aged 45. Weeks after her death, he successfully auditioned for Rada and went on to become a stage actor. His TV breakthrough came in Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years. He has since starred in Green Wing, Episodes and The Split. He co-hosts Landscape and Portrait Artist of the Year on Sky Arts, and a weekly show on Classic FM. He is currently appearing in throuple comedy Unicorn in the West End and is the author of six bestselling children's books. His seventh is out in May. Your sister Anita illustrates your books. What's it like working with a sibling? Great fun. Essentially we're trying to make each other laugh, like we have done since childhood. But because I'm her annoying older brother, I deliberately put things in the book that are difficult to draw. Do you use your three sons as a focus group? I use my 14-year-old as a plot consultant. If I've painted myself into a corner, I'll have a chat with Frank. He's very good at talking me through my logical inconsistencies. Then Jack, who's now nine, reads a draft while I try not to be the person going: 'What were you laughing at there? Why aren't you laughing at this bit?' What things do you need to write? A lot of food and coffee. I come up to my office with a tray full of coffee, nuts and apples. Then I try not to stare out of the window, while eating like a demented squirrel. Acting is a team sport whereas writing is solitary, so it's nice to yo-yo between the two. You're approaching the end of your West End run in Mike Bartlett's Unicorn. Have you enjoyed it? I've loved it. It's a play full of good ideas and great lines. Also Erin [Doherty] and Nicola [Walker, his co-stars] are two of the very best. They're both so present on stage. Sometimes you work with actors who've worked out their performance in their bathroom at home and are going to give that performance come hell or high water. What's lovely is that we all listen to one another and every night is genuinely very different. It's great that a new play has done so well in the West End. And it feels absolutely contemporary. What's been the audience reaction? Has it started conversations or inspired any 'throuples'? We do get standing ovations at the end but we also get people leaving after 10 minutes because they weren't expecting that nice couple from The Split to be telling each other what they want to do in bed. I know people who've had uncomfortable taxi rides home afterwards. We've had throuples come to talk to us at the stage door. The other day, we had a bloke and two women who'd been together for 40 years. We've had three women who'd been together 20 years. In a way, I've got more questions for them than they have for me. You just want to know how it works. Even sleeping arrangements. With three people in a bed, who goes in the middle? What happens if you have to get up to go to the loo? Have you seen Erin Doherty in Adolescence? I've put it off because we're doing this play together and it would feel weird. As soon as Unicorn's run finishes this week, I'll sit down and watch it. Partly because Erin's in it and Stephen Graham, who's fantastic. But also because I've got three boys and I think it's an important thing to watch. Who do you get more recognised as nowadays – Dan Moody from I'm Alan Partridge or Guy Secretan from Green Wing? I still get 'Dan!' shouted at me several times per week. It tends to be Guy if I go near a hospital. Suddenly a lot of doctors emerge, wanting to tell me that he's a hero to them, especially if they're an anaesthetist. Which I'm not sure is terribly reassuring to hear [laughs]. What's your dream role? I've been playing quite nice people or bumbling idiots lately, so I'd like to play someone really unpleasant. It's always fun to exercise those bits of you. Would you like to play an Irish character? Yeah, I mean for goodness sake! Here I am, Mr Irish – even if I don't look it. People think I'm a posh English boy, which in some ways I am. I had a posh English upbringing but my family background is entirely Irish. My mum was flame-haired, freckled Mary Donohoe. Your wife, Louise Delamere, is also an actor. How would you feel if your sons wanted to act professionally? Well, it's given me a fantastic life. I'm forever grateful that I decided not to be a lawyer and became an actor instead. Why wouldn't I want that for my children? Although of course you're aware of how precarious it is and how buffeted by the winds of fortune you can be. How do you relax when you're not working? I've had a Spurs season ticket since 1997. It's been hellish this season. It's like going to a huge group therapy session, where 60,000 people sit in a circle and try to examine what's gone wrong in their life to bring them to this point. And I'm a big runner. A two-hour run is my meditation. I'm doing the London Marathon this week. What cultural things have you enjoyed recently?Like everyone else, I watched The White Lotus. My son saw A Complete Unknown and has become obsessed with Bob Dylan, so we've been ploughing through all the various Dylan documentaries. I listen to a lot of history podcasts and just read Helen Castor's book on Richard II. In terms of fiction, I loved The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon and The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. You play piano and were in a prog rock band at school. Do you secretly dream of rock stardom?I think all actors want to be rock stars. But the great thing about acting is you can still do it when you're 80 and no one goes: 'Why is he still doing that?' The Fart That Saved the Universe by Stephen Mangan, illustrated by Anita Mangan, is out on 8 May (Scholastic, £7.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Telegraph
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Beyond Paradise's Sally Bretton: ‘There's always a voice in my head telling me not to show off'
Many actors grumble about the tedious rigmarole of junkets and interviews. Sally Bretton walks the talk. She may have appeared in some of TV's biggest hits over the past 24 years – as Donna the intern in The Office, HR worker Kim in Green Wing, female lead Lucy in Not Going Out – but she has only ever done a single newspaper profile before, and today she finds herself anxiously sitting in front of me in the Covent Garden offices of the publicists of her latest primetime success. That profile was also for the Telegraph, but was clearly so invigorating, she has waited exactly a decade to repeat the process. 'I just, if I can… yeah,' she says, trailing off, seemingly to avoid offending me. 'If you can avoid it, you avoid it?' I ask in clarification. She beams her megawatt smile and shrugs: 'Yeah.' The 48-year-old insists she is not here under duress – she is just keen to do her bit for the Devon and Cornwall-set spin-off of Death in Paradise, whose third series is coming to BBC One. 'I want Beyond Paradise to run and run. I love working on it, I love everybody who's involved in it and if these things help to support it, then I want to do that.' Bretton plays Martha Lloyd, fiancée to Kris Marshall 's DI Humphrey Goodman, the couple having returned from Death in Paradise's Saint Marie in the Caribbean (real-life Guadeloupe) to Martha's hometown, the equally fictional and crime-ridden Shipton Abbott (Looe in Cornwall). It is only the second part of what we must now call the 'Paraverse', which, last year, was also supplemented by the Australian-set Return to Paradise. She got the call to reprise her role during the Covid lockdown and it was 'an immediate yes', she says. 'I loved playing her and the combination of, one, doing that with Kris, and two, feeling like there was something at the other end of everything – I thought, 'Even if it comes to nothing, I will spend the next three weeks in the imaginary world of it'. So yeah, I was over the moon.' She pops back and forth to the South West between July and November and says her heart is lifted not just by the beautiful scenery, but by the 'comedy lightness of touch' of her colleagues, most of whom are established sitcom stars (Alan Partridge veteran Felicity Montagu plays eccentric Margo while Derry Girls ' Dylan Llewellyn is gormless Constable Kelby). Series by series, increasing numbers of fans have been turning up on location. 'They're very excited to see Kris. I think he might be considered a heartthrob for some – of all ages. Some people get quite giddy around him.' The actress's media shyness dates back to her first stage experiences – aged seven in school plays, starting with The Enormous Turnip, in which she starred as the farmer's wife. 'If you got given the lead role, you'd be taken aside and told this doesn't make you any more special than anybody else and sort of, no showing off allowed,' she explains. 'I think maybe there's always slightly that voice in the back of my head that has a check on the showing off aspect of things.' Yes, she can remember the name of the teacher who taught her this formative life lesson. No, she shan't be telling me what it is. She grew up in Hertfordshire, but wouldn't specify where, when asked in 2015, and won't be doing so now. And nobody needs to know what her parents did for a living. Perhaps I should find all this caginess irritating, and if all actors adopted her interview-rate, I'd be looking for a new career. But there is something refreshing about her quiet focus on just getting on with the job. Bretton says she has been able to sustain her peculiar approach to publicity because she mainly worked in ensemble pieces – with 'plenty of funnier and more established people to do their press' – and that includes her role in Not Going Out, Britain's second-longest-running sitcom (behind Last of the Summer Wine). Asked to do promotion, she said she would if Lee Mack – the show's creator and her on-screen husband – desired her to. 'He'd say, 'Do you want to?' And I'd say, 'No I don't.' And he'd say, 'You don't have to.'' Having joined the series in 2007, she's learnt to be almost as guarded with Mack as she is around me, after she found her foibles and family stories making their way into the script. 'Any weakness in your personality – he'll remember and just sort of bring up.' Can she give any examples? 'I'm not going to tell YOU what the weaknesses in my personality are.' What about an anecdote? 'No, I don't want to because they're too near the bone for me to say,' she insists, adding that the only mercy is no-one can distinguish what is her and what is the character. She is now hugely grateful that after graduating from the Central School of Speech and Drama she found another Sally Davis (her birth name) had registered at Equity, forcing her to choose 'Bretton' from a book of names put on the staff coffee table by the deputy manager of her Saturday job at Next in Barnet. She says it aids the 'construct in my head' that Davis and Bretton lead two separate lives. Bretton, who is married with three daughters – a 13-year-old and 11-year-old twins – is fazed by the introspection she feels I am urging her to do. 'Again, you're making me reflect,' she says at one point. 'And, as I explained to you, I'm too busy running around the supermarket at 8am.' And she does not dream of being on Graham Norton or Would I Lie To You? 'Oh no, I don't want to be on a panel show. I'm not very good at thinking on my feet. I talk in a lot of half sentences, and finish off sentences with lots of hand gestures and… erm….' she says petering out once again. 'See!' Yet she has come to enjoy families coming up to her on the street to talk about Martha, particularly the storylines involving a miscarriage, failed fertility treatment and fostering. 'People have spoken about how they've appreciated the IVF story not necessarily ending happily ever after with the baby and what happens if you're not one of those successful couples and where do you find yourself? As opposed to just being lucky at the end, because not everyone is.' Humphrey and Martha's relationship – with Jamie Bamber's ex-fiancé Archie back this series to put a fly in the ointment – provides the emotional ballast to the show. Although Bretton is best known for her TV roles, she has always regarded herself more as a creature of the theatre (she played Goneril in a 2008 production of King Lear at Shakespeare's Globe). She relishes the light-hearted TV parts, 'but I would love to do something more gritty and use those muscles a bit more as well'. That said, the shows she opts to binge are of the tranquil-paradise variety. 'I want to watch something soothing, that will hold my attention, but does not stress me out. So for me, Beyond Paradise has decades ahead of it because that's the sort of stuff I like. I just don't want to get my amygdala involved when I'm watching telly – much to my husband's irritation.' Ten years ago, aged 39, she bemoaned the lot of actresses over 40: 'It gets more annoying as you get older, and you start thinking of opportunities narrowing.' She is surprised when I repeat the quote to her. 'We know that it does,' she says, but: 'I am lucky and I haven't personally felt that. I'm busier now probably than ever. It does narrow and you've got to hope that you get through the narrowing. But I am more optimistic than I sounded then.' The bottleneck has certainly not come yet. Earlier this month, she was on Channel 5 as David Suchet's daughter in the drama The Au Pair and is about to start filming the 14th series of Not Going Out – having just starred in a crossover sketch of the sitcom with Beyond Paradise for Comic Relief, in which she plays both Lucy and Martha. Remaining guarded about herself and continuing to stand firmly behind the characters she plays is a strategy she would recommend to any young wannabes, who now have to fend off the lure of social media exposure as well as pesky hacks. 'I have spoken to people who have been incredibly successful and then got to a certain point and so much of their freedom has gone and so much of their privacy has been taken that sometimes they question the exchange,' she gently counsels. 'And I would just want to flag it.' The tape recorder goes off and Bretton lets out a sigh of relief that she doesn't have to put herself through this again – on current trends – until 2035.
The Independent
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Stephen Mangan: Maybe middle aged panic is setting in, I'm clinging to whatever fitness I have
Actor and author Stephen Mangan says he feels 'edgy' if he hasn't managed to get out for a run. The star of BBC's The Split and sitcom Episodes says: 'I just feel slightly antsy if I haven't run in a day. Some people put on lycra and ride around parks on bikes – I run up a hill.' The 56-year-old, whose roles have included Adrian Mole in the BBC adaptation, Guy Secretan in Green Wing, and Dan Moody in I'm Alan Partridge, says perhaps it's his age. 'I've got quite a few friends into running, maybe middle-aged panic is setting in. We're all trying to cling onto whatever fitness and youth we still have.' Mangan, who is a World Book Day '£1 author' this year – offering his children's book The Fart That Broke World Book Day for £1/€1.50 to get more kids reading – got the running 'bug' after doing his first marathon at 30. 'It's very therapeutic,' he says, 'Whatever's bothering you tends to float to the surface. It's sort of your brain churning away without really consciously doing it, and also getting outside in the fresh air. 'When you're doing a play, you have to keep yourself in pretty good shape.' Mangan is currently starring alongside The Split co-star Nicola Walker in Unicorn at the Garrick Theatre, playing a couple who bring a third person into their marriage. 'It's nice in the play that we're married again after the horrendous split,' he says with a laugh. 'We just get on and we really like each other, and we're very relaxed with each other – she's a great actress.' For any stage actor, keeping up energy levels to perform every evening for a long run is taxing. 'It's a slight jet lag thing,' explains Mangan, 'rather than getting up at 6am to go on a film set, you shift your whole focus to later in the day. So I might write for three hours a day, go for a run, stare at a wall for a bit, read a couple of books, go and lie on the stage for 10 minutes, and then, hopefully by 7:30 I'm in the right frame of mind to be in a throuple. Between TV and film acting, theatre, radio (recently starring in BBC's The Island) and writing children's books – as well as being a dad to three boys, Harry, 17, Frank 14, and Jack, eight – life is 'disordered and chaotic', he says. ' Running, reading and eating opportunities have to be grabbed whenever they present themselves for all those three things,' he says, and reading is 'completely central' to his life and wellbeing. 'There are long hours on set or sat in a trailer waiting to go on set [as an actor] that's perfect for reading. I'll read in the kitchen when everyone else is clanking about. I'll read on the [London] tube. I'll read in my dressing room, wherever I can grab a bit of time. I've normally got three of four books on the go at once.' As a child Mangan always had his 'head in a book', even at the dinner table. 'I would read all the way through meals – I wouldn't stop to eat.' He adds: 'My parents weren't that flush with money, but would always let me buy any book I wanted. They were very supportive of me reading so I really quickly built up quite a big library of books.' Mangan, married to actor Louise Delamere, reckons he owns thousands now – 'My wife is like, 'You've read it, you know, you're not going to re-read it.' But he equates finding an author he likes to making a friend. 'This is why people feel so desolate when they finish a great book, they're really enjoying the relationship. It's not over, but that intense, passionate period has come to an end, and you can't throw a book away,' he laughs Research shows more than a million children in the UK don't own a book. 'It's heartbreaking really, because there is this world, and there are all of those worlds [in books],' he says. 'And to be able to visit those worlds, to be able to visit other people's lives, and be able to look at the world through the eyes of great writers – who can see something about the world and who we are and the way we behave that the rest of us can't, and can articulate it so beautifully and movingly and hilariously – I want that for everybody,' says Mangan. Another barrier could be the prevalence of screens though, too. 'Screens are sort of crack cocaine for children and it's very hard to compete with that dopamine hit,' he says. 'We're living through this really crazy social experiment with phones and screens and one day we'll look back on as several generations that had a very peculiar upbringing.' When his own children were little, 'my favourite bit of the day was sitting on [the] bed reading together' – and it's something Mangan has encouraged ever since, even naming the heroes in his books after his boys. 'You'd think that writing a book would be encouragement enough [for them to read] but I'm the least impressive person they know. I'm just their dad.' From his breakthrough TV debut in Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years in 2001, Mangan's career has steadily flourished – which has made fame easier to handle, he says. 'I was never in one massive smash hit at a young age, and it went from nought to 60. Everything has very gradually happened to me. So it's almost without noticing it.' So the level of fame he's acquired is 'not intrusive' – 'I haven't got a phalanx of stalkers outside. It's very bearable.' Although the people pleaser in him is 'hard to shift', he's become 'more discerning' as he's got older. 'I think you know when you've done a good piece of work so I'm not interested anymore in what people say in newspapers or on TV or in reviews. It doesn't' bother me. 'I still want to please people, but I think who I want to please has become a smaller group. I have people I admire and respect, and their opinion is of great value to me 'If you really want to hunt for someone who thinks you're a t***, you can find them, of course. [But] why? It's of no interest to me, either to find people who think I'm awful, or to find people who think I'm the best thing since sliced bread, if there are any. That's their issue.' World Book Day (celebrated on March 6) is a charity that improves access to books, helping children to read for fun, because it improves lives.
The Guardian
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I'm in my early 20s most of the time… totally up for it!': Tamsin Greig on ageing, caring and learning bass guitar
Not many interviews begin with your subject telling you, gently and warmly, how they've mastered being unapproachable. But here is Tamsin Greig, on Zoom in the Donmar Warehouse's rehearsal rooms, telling me how this behaviour begins as soon as she's left the house every morning. 'I get up at 6.30 to walk the dog so that I can get out and be in the air to start turning my words over in my head. People who see me know not to come near me because I'm always muttering to myself.' Then she gets the tube ('a good place to learn my lines'), but admits she gets recognised – unsurprisingly, given her classic roles in so many shows, from Black Books to Green Wing, Episodes to Friday Night Dinner. 'But when I'm not speaking I have quite an angry face' – she raises her eyebrows slightly, impishly, as she says this – 'which I use to my advantage.' This has been Greig's recent routine ahead of co-starring in a radical new play, Backstroke, which opens next weekend at the Donmar. She plays Bo, a woman dealing with work, a struggling daughter and the aftermath of her force-of-nature mother, Beth, having a stroke. Beth is played by fellow TV-to-stage veteran Celia Imrie. 'Obviously, Celia thinks it's incredibly rude that she's been cast as my mother, but that's fair enough because she is eternally youthful,' Greig points out (Imrie is 72 to Greig's 58). Then comes her London run in Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea, which transfers to the Theatre Royal Haymarket from an acclaimed run in Bath last summer (one critic said she 'brilliantly conveys a woman calcified by misery', another that she was 'made for wit'). Then – keep up – she also stars in Happy Valley creator Sally Wainwright's new show for the BBC, Riot Women, about five middle-aged women forming a punk band, showing later this year. She plays Holly Gaskell, a retiring police officer who turns out to be 'rubbish at the bass but good at being in a band'. Greig had to learn to play the instrument for it. How was that? She grins, a little proudly. 'Well, I actually had to act a bit more rubbish than I've become.' She tried to channel Joan Armatrading, and … and … she struggles for a name. 'Come on, brain! What's her name? She's so famous!' The name arrives delicately on her tongue. 'Chrissie Hynde. Honestly. How difficult was it to remember that name when it was so easy to picture her? It'll be interesting to see if any of my lines come out of my mouth at the Donmar … ' Backstroke is another female-dominated production for Greig, with five women on stage and an all-female stage management team ('very, very unusual, and very lovely'). It's influenced by elements of the life of its writer-director, Anna Mackmin, who was brought up in a commune by a formidable woman and with whom she had no clearly defined parent-child relationship. 'I'm dealing with a human being who's very complex and wounded and an incredibly adept survivor,' Greig says. 'From the age of five, she had to develop a means of engaging with the world where she is fully alive but also had to learn to be her own bodyguard.' The play spans the characters' whole lives, including how memory suddenly intrudes in tough times, mixing in filmed sequences behind the actors, which occasionally interact with the script. Greig and Imrie play mother and daughter at different ages without costume or makeup – which means Greig has to act as a child. How does that work? 'What we're discovering is the more I use my voice but just remain faithful to the words that Anna has written, the truer the character is. At one point someone asks, 'How old are you?' And Bo says' – her voice goes softer, more precise – ''I'm pretty close to being six.' Just through the words, I'm that little girl.' Greig's childhood was not particularly privileged. Her father, Eric, who was 60 when she was born, was a stay-at-home dad (Greig said in a 2012 Observer Food Monthly interview that he was 'never able to show affection emotionally or physically', although he did bring her liquidised coq au vin to the hospital when she was seven, in an isolation ward with glandular fever). Her mother, Ann, worked as a secretary, and at one point the family went bankrupt, living in what Greig once called 'a shithole' in Kilburn, north-west London. Still, Greig loved being the middle of three sisters (Dorcas is older, Abigail younger) all born a year apart ('My goodness, we had fun'). She encountered Celia Imrie for the first time with her mother, watching Imrie playing overdramatic shop owner Miss Babs in Victoria Wood's Acorn Antiques. 'My mum was born in Leeds but left as a teenager,' Greig says, 'and then sort of transformed herself into somebody very posh and left behind her working-class roots. So when she watched things like Victoria Wood, you could see that she was smelling a different aroma. There was something there about her memories that I didn't have access to.' Greig's parents died before she was a household name – her mother in 2001, when Greig was filming the second series of Black Books, and her eldest children (of three) were two and one ('it was a very testing time'). Greig is aware that many people of her age are squeezed between caring for elderly parents and their growing children. 'And I am very glad, in a way, that I was able to be there to offer the care that I was able to give in my 30s, because so much is required of you, of your heart and your physicality and your mental agility.' She's passionate about end-of-life care. 'We can't be a fully rounded society without it.' But back to Imrie. She and Greig first crossed paths in real life when they starred in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel alongside Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Penelope Wilton, staying in the same 'monstrously beautiful hotels – I just basically jumped on the tails of the dames'. Imrie prepared a welcome party for Greig's family (Greig's husband, actor Richard Leaf, to whom she's been married since 1997, and their children) who were due to arrive for a visit while Greig was shooting her scenes. 'She couldn't bear the idea that they were all turning up and I wouldn't be there to greet them, including my children, who were quite little then. I was so moved by her doing that. But that's who she is.' We talk about other things in our lively 40 minutes: how much Greig loved Nick Cave's recent Desert Island Discs ('I'm a real fan … he sees performing as a kind of communion with people … I feel like that with the theatre') and how some children seem frozen at younger ages since the pandemic, while others grew up fast. What age do you feel? 'I'm in my early 20s most of the time. Like, you know, totally up for it! Then I realise, of course, that after lunch I have to have a nanna nap. I mean, literally. At the Donmar, they've had to make sure that there is a room available at lunchtime for me to go and lie down.' Snoozing aside, Greig strikes me as a potential dame, given her stage and theatre credits to date and what's to come. What does she still wish for? 'To do a show on Broadway – which I've come close to a few times – and to let my face be the age that it is.' She loved watching Harriet Walter as Thatcher in the recent Brian and Maggie, she says. 'To look at an actor and think, 'You are so brilliant at what you do, and your face has got so many stories in it.' To see the life! Maybe that's my ambition, just to keep on getting older and older, challenging the industry to keep on employing me.' Backstroke is at the Donmar Warehouse, London WC2, from 15 February to 12 April
