Alison Steadman on Gavin and Stacey, relationships, and ageing: ‘Staying friends after divorce wasn’t difficult for me and Mike Leigh’

The ‘Gavin and Stacey’ star tells Kate Mossman about her real-life road trip with Larry to Barry, being Robbie Williams’ nan, staying friends with her ex – and a ‘horrible’ encounter with Harvey Weinstein

Alison Steadman: ‘I always wanted to be free to do whatever I wanted’ (Getty)

A red double canoe sails past the window behind Alison Steadman while she fiddles with her camera on the Zoom. She is at her holiday home in Dorset, which sits on a canal teeming with coots and moorhens. Steadman would be good presenting a nature show: nature is her big passion. In fact she did once, she points out, in the Eighties – the Channel 4 science programme Nature In Focus, in which she played a woman called Helen who led her small boy around and encouraged him to look under pebbles. “I would say, “Oh, look at that ant,’ then he’d go, ‘What?’ and I’d say, ‘No, look at it, it’s fascinating.’” It looks deadpan written down but in person, she radiates enthusiasm.

Steadman is one of our most distinctive actresses, instantly recognisable and effortlessly familiar. The paradox is that she has built a career as a character actor, including her winning role as Pam in the much-loved BBC sitcom Gavin and Stacey. In her new show, however, she plays herself, reuniting with her Gavin and Stacey co-star Larry Lamb for Alison and Larry: Billericay to Barry, a road trip travelogue in which the two Essex parents of TV’s Gavin and Stacey drive between their fictional home and that of their son’s fiancée in a Volvo rechargeable car.

It has had some poor reviews: one pointed out a surprising lack of chemistry between the pair. Driving shows require spontaneous chat and improvisation, of which Steadman is queen (she was, of course, Mike Leigh’s star and wife for many years). Yet it is a shyer, more restrained Steadman who rides shotgun and sips a wine for each of Lamb’s non-alcoholic gins in the gastropubs of Harpenden. Is it difficult, improvising “as herself” as opposed to in character?