Streetwise

I am meeting the actress Sarah Lancashire at Brown's Hotel for tea. Brown's is very, very smart. I'm early and hang about the lobby. "Are you waiting for someone?" the uniformed staff keep asking. "Are you sure?" I think they're just being nice until it suddenly clicks that, actually, they're worried I might be a bag lady who's stepped in for the warmth. Sarah arrives. She is very pretty. Big blue eyes, neat blonde bob, the sort of wonderful complexion I'm going to have in my next life, because I've told God I'll be very good in this one if he lets me have a wonderful complexion in the next.

I am meeting the actress Sarah Lancashire at Brown's Hotel for tea. Brown's is very, very smart. I'm early and hang about the lobby. "Are you waiting for someone?" the uniformed staff keep asking. "Are you sure?" I think they're just being nice until it suddenly clicks that, actually, they're worried I might be a bag lady who's stepped in for the warmth. Sarah arrives. She is very pretty. Big blue eyes, neat blonde bob, the sort of wonderful complexion I'm going to have in my next life, because I've told God I'll be very good in this one if he lets me have a wonderful complexion in the next.

I want to impress her. I don't want her to think that, along with having rubbish skin, I'm pathetically unworldly, too. I pretend I feel most at home in Brown's. "The cloakroom is just there," I say. "Shall we go in for tea?" I say. "Fine, lovely," she says. I note she has beautifully long, clear-polished nails. "Beautiful nails," I sigh enviously. "Are they yours?" "Are they bugger!" she says. "They're stuck on. I've got horrible hands, actually. They're like feet." I think we might get on.

We go into the lounge where the pianist is tinkling away and the wives of American bankers sit with their children and their children's vast Hamley's bags. We order tea for two. Sarah pours and forgets to use the little silver strainer thingie. "Oops. Bloody hell," she says. The tea leaves stick most attractively to our teeth. I think it most unlikely that we'll pull. It turns out, yes, that she is as rubbish at being smart as I am. Neither of us, for example, would have sufficient courage to go into a shop like Prada. We'd know they'd know we didn't really belong. Sarah says she doesn't mind about this, actually. She doesn't want a £789 Prada hand-bag. "You're only buying status, a bit of élitism. I've worked bloody hard for my money and I'm not spending it on that." I say the thing with me is that there just wouldn't be any point, because I move in the kind of circles where people can't tell a Prada bag from a Sainsbury one.

She says: "And neither can I."

We would like to smoke, but can't, because Brown's is irritatingly non-smoking. She says she gave up smoking last year, and actually managed it from August through to Christmas Day. And then? "I put the turkey in the oven, then realised I hadn't taken the giblets out. They were in there in a plastic bag somewhere. I had to take out the turkey, take out the stuffing, shove my hand up its bottom... I felt like such a failure. I was nearly in tears. Then my brother came in with a packet of Silk Cut and that was that."

We agree to pay up in Brown's and go elsewhere. The bill comes to £59.85. Sarah is brilliantly appalled. There's a space for "gratuity" on the credit card receipt. "Don't leave a gratuity! Don't! Don't," she cries.

She is quite a socialist. She has been most disappointed by Tony Blair. "I voted him in, but I'm not for him anymore. He's without direction. He's not the socialist I thought he was. Nothing he does or says rings true." She does not intend to visit the Dome: "£750m? It's obscene. I wouldn't step through the door. It's just a big tit on the landscape built by wanky tossers."

"Is that Wanky Tossers Limited, or Wanky Tossers & Son," I say, "because I don't want to libel the wrong firm."

"It's Wanky Tossers plc," she says.

I think that Brown's might be quite pleased when we leave.

We go to a little café two doors down. As we go in, a group of workmen at the first table nudge each other and whisper loudly: "Is it her? It is. It is. Isn't it?" Sarah winces. I scold her. I tell her not to be so egotistical. What makes you think they're talking about you? They might be talking about me. They might have mistaken me for Michelle Pfeifer. It's a common enough error. Honestly, you're so vain, I bet you even think this article is going to be about you, don't you? "Sorry," she says. We order two coffees from the nice Italian man behind the counter.

We are charged £2.

"You should raise your prices, mate," she tells him. "You should see what they're charging for tea next door."

"And it doesn't even come in a bag!' I say."And it doesn't even come in a bag!," she confirms.

We light up. I think that we are bestest friends by now. I think, even, that, if she ever had a slumber party, I would get invited. I am pleased about this. I do admire her so.

She's a tremendous actress, I think, and if you never saw her as Raquel Wolstenhulme in Coronation Street then all I can say is: "Poor you!" And I know what I'm talking about. I love Coronation Street. I've been addicted for years. I've been addicted ever since Elsie Tanner painted her bathroom black and the marvellous Mrs Malaprop that was Hilda Ogden described it as "disgusting... almost phonographic! " So I've seen the greats - the Elsies and Hildas, who were as brilliantly watchable as anything you might see at the National - and I would certainly count Sarah's Raquel among them.

How best to describe Raquel? Well, she wore little skirts and big heels and big hair and big make-up and was Miss Betterbuys, 1991. Although, mostly, she worked behind the bar at the Rovers, she rather fancied herself as a glamour model.

I remember her going off to London to do a slipper shoot. It was not a great success. "None of the slippers fitted," she complained on her return. "I told them I was a size six, but I've got long toes like my Auntie Doris." Yes, there was comedy. But such was the power of Sarah's performance there was vulnerability and heartache and real tragedy and painful gullibility there, too.

I almost could not bear it when she took French lessons from Ken Barlow and Ken asked her if she knew any French. "Yes, she replied, "A man once taught me how to say: 'It's a nice day, isn't it?'" Ken asked to hear it. "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?" she answered so proudly. Funny, but sad. Sad, but funny. That was, I think, Raquel's brilliance.

Sarah left the series in 1996. I tell her I still miss her. She says that's a kind thing for me to say, but in the end she just couldn't be doing with all the fame. She just couldn't get comfortable with it. "You walk down the street and you're Raquel, not Sarah." She couldn't do the personal appearance circuit. "It's big money, but everyone's disappointed when you, rather than your character, turns up."

She gave a couple of interviews to TV mags and the like at the beginning, but it was depressing. "I would be asked about my favourite outfits. I felt like an airhead. I felt what I was doing in my life was crap." She refused, ultimately, to do any publicity for the series. "And I told them that I would leave if they made me."

Her post-Corrie career started well enough with the amiable ITV drama Where The Heart Is, but I think this year is going to be her year, frankly. She is currently in the new, four-part Paul Abbot drama, Clocking Off, which started last night on BBC1. An ensemble piece centred on a textile factory, Sarah plays Yvonne, a single mother of three who torches her own house for the insurance and ends up living with her neighbour, Christopher Ecclestone. It is cracking stuff. I tell her I'm glad she didn't end up in panto with some old trollop from Neighbours, as so many former soap stars do.

She says: "I was offered panto, but I chose not to do it. They could have offered me £500,000, and I wouldn't have done it." I don't think she is being snobby here. She is just bright enough to know that some avenues are best left untravelled. She has yet to do Hello! "even though they offered to send me and the family to the Seychelles. For free! I said: 'Please. Why can't you send a family that can't afford it?'"

She was born and brought up in Oldham where her father, Geoffrey, was a writer who actually penned some 150 early episodes of Coronation Street before going on to create the successful sit-coms The Cuckoo Waltz and The Lovers.

She adores her father - "a very bright, intelligent, creative man" - as she does her mother, Hilda, too. "She's the greatest woman ever." She has three brothers, one older, one younger and a twin, Simon.

She was dispatched to a single-sex private school at 11 and didn't much like it at all. Having been bought up in a largely male household, she wasn't, she says, very girlish. "I found girls' conversations very difficult. Hair, nail-varnish, boys. I thought boys were just great people to play cricket with." She took up drama at 17, when it was part of one of her A-levels. "That was the first time I went on stage, and I found it exhilarating."

She trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, then went on to teach theatre at Salford University College. She was teaching there when she landed the part of Raquel. By this time, she'd already married her teenage sweetheart - Gary Hargreaves, a saxophonist - and had two sons, Matthew, now 12 and Thomas, 10. She and Gary are now divorced, but remain friends.

She sounds like she's a brilliant mother. She does rollerblading. She does kickabouts in the park. She is quite good in goal, she says. I say I'm rubbish in goal. I say my son gets very annoyed with me because I can let in 456 goals in four minutes. The other day he even decided to give me goal-keeping tips on the top deck of the bus. "THE TROUBLE WITH YOU MUMMY," he said, in a very loud voice, "IS THAT YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO KEEP YOUR LEGS TOGETHER." The driver even winked at me when we got off!

She says, yes, children can be gloriously embarrassing. She remembers being in her GP's surgery with one her of hers, when he pointed at the man opposite and said: "MUMMY, WHY HAS THAT MAN GOT SUCH BAD TEETH?' She wanted to die, she says. But, then, "the thing I really love about kids is their lack of inhibition and honesty. And their questions, like: 'Why does it rain?', so that I have to get all the books out and show them the sea and the sun and evaporation..." So you don't just say: "It's God letting his bath water out. Now shhhh, I'm trying to watch Peak Practice"?

"No. Do you?" "Of course not." She has dated a couple of men since the marriage break-up, but it's a terrible faff and she can't be bothered really. I say I could never date again. You know, all that business of feeling compelled to wear foundation to bed because you don't want him to know you've got rubbish skin. She says she is quite happy without a man, actually. She's brilliant at DIY - "I can do wiring, even. And garage doors" - plus it's not like her biological clock is ticking. "I've already got my family."

And she has her work, of course. This includes Seeing Red, a Granada TV film about Coral Atkins, the actress and children's home founder, which is being shown in March. Plus she's about to start filming Chambers, Clive Coleman's witty take on barristers which is transferring from Radio 4 to BBC television.

Anyway, she has to go. She's got to get home. She's got the 6pm train to Manchester to catch. I give her a lift in a taxi to Euston. We embrace affectionately. I hope she has that slumber party. We can play stick-on nails. I then realise I forgot to ask her the only question I actually truly wanted to ask her: "Is Mavis hiding in Rita's ever-growing hair-do? How long before the Kabin roof is going to have to be raised?" I do wish someone would answer me on these.