Unmissable show
Anything with Chris Lilley, who did Summer Heights High. He recently had Jonah From Tonga and Ja’mie: Private School Girl. It’s weird characters in the middle of nowhere. I’m from a small village just outside Sheffield, and all my dad’s friends are oddballs. I really like the idea of being able to do that sort of thing myself. He does it absolutely perfectly.
Earliest TV memory?
Every Friday night, me and my mum would sit down and watch all those great British sitcoms. You know, like The Vicar Of Dibley or The Fast Show, stuff like that. I was really close to my mum. She died not very long ago, and I was thinking about why it was that we were so close. And I think part of it was the fact that we had that: sitting on a sofa on a Friday night and laughing together.
Game show have-a-go?
Deal Or No Deal because it’s a glorified tombola. And yet, magnetically, I am drawn to it so much. I want to be in the Dream Factory. I want Noel Edmonds’s lovely little Chewbacca face egging me on. He gets so into it. You think, “Yes. Noel, you really, really care!” And yet it’s just like a kind of WI fete. And you’ve picked the right box. He invents so much skill to be part of it.
Bring back…
Spaced, because it’s big and funny and a bit silly and a bit weird, but also really embracing and not at all elitist or cold. Spaced was, for me, one of the big iconic shows that also managed to be warm. You felt like you wanted to be part of their world – you wanted them to be your friends.
Pitch us a TV show…
A mashup of Come Dine With Me and Downton Abbey. I want Lady Edith complaining about the consommé, and the course taking ages to get out because she gets pissed on the port. Lady Crawley, she’s really worried about the look of her mini kievs, that sort of thing. And then at the end Hugh Bonneville rates them all out of 10 in a horse-drawn carriage.
Up The Women returns on Wed, 10.05pm, BBC2
