Jane Asher: Domestic goddess

Jane Asher has moved seamlessly from Sixties poppet on the arm of Paul McCartney to 21st-century 'superbitch' in the newly relaunched Crossroads. Along the way, she's made a fortune from baking cakes. It's a strange career trajectory for a theatre actress with a taste for highbrow literature. So what attracted her to wobbly sets and leopard-spot costumes?

So, up to Nottingham, to the new Crossroads (that's the new new Crossroads), which now stars Jane Asher, who has that gorgeous helmet of orange hair and does those lovely cakes and has always struck me as the sort of woman whose colonic irrigation – should she go in for such things – would probably result in several bowls of pot-pourri and a lavender-scented drawer-liner or two. Now, though, here she is, in the new new Crossroads, which is being promoted as "a Dallas for teatime" and is well saucy. Goodness, even the receptionist wears a bustier! How times change and all that. Can you imagine Amy Turtle in a bustier? I'm convinced she was never Amy Tutolovski, by the way, even though that Russian spy business was never adequately resolved.

Lots of things were never adequately resolved in the old – that's the old old – Crossroads. Remember Shughie McFee, who went to get some pork chops from the deep freeze and didn't return for four years? Ms Asher later assures me that the production values on the new new Crossroads are top-notch. "A lot of care and trouble is being taken." I say that I've caught three episodes so far, but have yet to see a paying guest. "Do we have people checking in?" she asks herself. "I've been filming now for three months and... no, I can't remember anyone checking in." In some ways, it's nice to know that the new new Crossroads is not so removed from the old old Crossroads.

When I arrive, I'm led on to the set and into the bedroom of Jane Asher's character Angel, matriarch and "superbitch". Angel is Angel Samson but not, alas, Angel Cake, which might have been more fun. Later, Ms Asher tells me that angel cake is actually a very fine thing "but not easy to do". I say I find the vivid tri-colour nature of angel cake off-putting. She says: "Oh no, proper angel cake – American angel cake – is always white." Ms Asher certainly knows her cake.

The bedroom, though. Well, the bedroom has a round bed with silk sheets, lights with little crystals dripping from them, a dressing table glimmering with mock diamonds and, yes, an adjoining Jacuzzi. (There's a lot of Jacuzzi action in the new new Crossroads. The actress – and I use the term quite loosely – Emma Noble seems to be permanently bubbling away in one, like a boil-in-the-bag cod, only in skimpy pink bikini rather than parsley sauce. It's not saucy in that way.) I'm told that no expense has been spared. I'm told that the look is "Vegas", although no one then goes on to specify whether they mean "Las" or "Johnny". Either way, frankly, it's more Homebase meets Holiday Inn via a depressed and grumpy Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen having a bad hair day.

Ms Asher, now 55, is here, yes, and as delightfully pretty as ever: that helmet of orange hair – does she ever have a bad hair day? – the violet-blue eyes, skin as pale and translucent as the ultra-fine tissue that wraps luxury soaps. She is otherwise occupied, though, with a magazine called, I think, All About Soap, which is doing a feature on Angel's wardrobe. Ms Asher has to hold up this frock then that, a bodice-shaped handbag then a pair of stilettoed pixie boots. I ask, later, if she minds doing stuff like this. Not at all, she says cheerfully, it goes with the territory. She would never wear the leopard-print Donna Karan trousers herself, by the way. "Naff. Smart naff, but naff." We are told not to approach the actual wardrobe "as it wobbles". I say, that's Crossroads for you. Ms Asher scolds me. She was quite a fan of the old old Crossroads herself and "it wasn't always wobbling sets. It was only later it went to pieces."

She is then called to filming. I'm informed she won't be long. But then one scene leads to another. And another and another. An hour goes by. Then two. I sneak to where they are shooting. It's an outside shot. Something to do with Angel and the handsome handyman. "I've had him," whispers Jane. "Any good?" I whisper back. She laughs. She doesn't reply. She can be annoyingly discreet. I'm told off for being here. I go back to Angel's bedroom. I try on a fur stole. And then a tiara. And then I get into the round bed with its silk sheets. The bed is top-notch, I admit. And then I am caught in the bed, in the fur stole and tiara, by the Press Officer who thinks, for some reason, that it might be better if I waited in the Press Office. So I wait in the Press Office.

And wait and wait and wait. Then, six hours – six hours! – after our appointed slot, I am told Ms Asher is free. This isn't Jane's fault, I know – the filming has gone all skew-whiff today – but still I am rather enraged. But, still, my knuckles are as white as... American angel cake? I'm minded to disembowel her. Who knows; aside from appeasing my anger, it might even lead to several bowls of pot-pourri and a lavender-scented drawer-liner.

Of course, Ms Asher, who is known to be Awfully, Awfully Nice, is Awfully, Awfully Sorry. Events beyond her control and all that. She takes me to the bar where she buys me wine and crisps, asks about train timetables, orders me a taxi for later. My knuckles pink-up. The rage drains as surely as Emma's bubbling Jacuzzis never do.

I ask her if she is ever deliberately horrid. "Of course," she exclaims. An example? She thinks for quite a while. I try to nudge her along. Broken something and said it wasn't you? Kicked the cat? Told your kids that unless they go to bed RIGHT NOW a big green monster will come in the middle of the night and hang them upside down until their noses fall off and eyes shoot from their sockets? Finally, she says that when she was at school, at Miss Lambert's Academy for Young Ladies in Marylebone, she once took against a girl called Susannah and wrote her a letter, which she signed "unlove, Jane". She thought that very clever at the time. She shudders now. Needless to say, I've never done that green monster thing with my own children, whatever they might say. It must be false memory syndrome.

I ask how she felt when she was first approached about Crossroads. She says she had reservations, of course, but then she met Yvon (Grace, the producer), "and I thought, why not? People do say to me: aren't you taking a bit of a risk? But I don't think so. I don't think it's going to affect my work in the theatre, do you?" Are you getting truckloads of money? "It's daytime TV," she stresses. What did your husband – the brilliant cartoonist Gerald Scarfe – think? "He thought 'ooer' at first, but then said, go for it." Her daughter (now grown up, along with her two sons) watched the first episode, she says, and loved it. "She's now hooked." Her mother, "a very lively 89-year-old," loved it too. "But then she loves everything I do."

I can't quite work out just how seriously Ms Asher takes the Crossroads and Angel business. At one point she calls it "this lovely nonsense" but the next minute she's talking about how Angel has "some terrific stuff to do. One of my sons dies and it was deeply upsetting. I was in a very bad way." There are proper tears in her violet-blue eyes. Sometimes there appear to be tears in Emma Noble's eyes, but it's probably just steam.

This is the thing about Jane Asher. She appears so fragrantly straightforward in that pot-pourri, Laura Ashley-ish sort of way, but she can't be, can she? OK, she writes the cake books as well as those best-selling fancy-dress ones – dress your daughter as a snowflake, why don't you? – but she's also written three rather dark, critically acclaimed novels. She's had spots on GMTV showing us how to make fridge magnets and doughcraft table decorations and the like, yet is happily married to a man much rated for the savagery of his visual attacks. She'll do Crossroads, even though she can be a supremely fine actress of considerable depth. She's one of Sir Alan Ayckbourn's favourites. And Christopher Hampton's. Sir Ian McKellen once described her as "having all the qualities for the great Shakespearean roles".

Do you think you've fully explored yourself, as an actress? "No, of course not. If I thought I had, why would I want to act any more? Why would any actor?" OK, you have to choose between cakes, acting and writing. What's it going to be? "Acting," she replies, "but only grudgingly." I say: if someone had never seen anything you'd been in, what would you show them? The Shallow End, she says, which she did with the RSC. "Only four people came to see it, but I think it was worth doing." I tell her that "four people" should not be underestimated. I mean, if four people booked into Crossroads it would be a start, no?

What, I wonder, does she think her image is? "It'll be cakes for some, the acting for others, books... anyone under 15 has probably never even heard of me." And, for others, the girl Paul McCartney didn't marry? Her lips snap shut disapprovingly. She's annoyingly discreet, as I've said. And smart. She knows exactly what interviews such as this are for. "When Dirk Bogarde wrote his first book he didn't do any interviews at all and it sold sort of all right. With the second they persuaded him to do a few, and it went through the roof."

So it's extremely effective, from that point of view, but this doesn't mean she has to give away her private self. "It's not as if you're a close friend," she says, rightly. "Journalists always say that I'm very closed in, but I'm not at all. I don't have to make everything public." Her father, Richard, an eminent endocrinologist, committed suicide when she was 20 or thereabouts, and this is another thing she's never talked about. "Partly, it's because my mother is still alive, but also because it would cheapen it." Her father also wrote, tackling medical subjects humorously. He's in many quotation books, and I particularly like his Three Golden Rules for Malingering. "1: You must make the impression you hate to be ill. 2: Make up your mind for one disease and stick to it. 3: Don't tell the doctor too much." We laugh when I quote this. "He was such fun," says Jane: "I miss him still."

I suggest, slyly, that his death must have affected her profoundly. Her lips snap shut. Certainly, Jane Asher has never confused giving the public what she does with giving the public who she is. We move on to safer ground when I say that, on my route to somewhere I once worked, I think there was a gift shop that sold the Jane Asher Range of Ceramic Hats. Was this so, or did I imagine it? It was so, she says joyfully, "and they sold very well." Jane does so many different things because she can. I don't think we need be suspicious.

It's time to go. My taxi is waiting. We finish up by talking briefly about books. She is big on books – loves Paul Auster, Ian McEwan, Iris Murdoch – and always has been. In my research, I uncover a mid-Sixties interview with her, when she was still dating Paul, in which she says: "I don't particularly like going to discothèques and sitting up until four in the morning in a haze of cigarette smoke. I'd sooner have a nice dinner and go home and read a book – Dostoevsky at the moment. He is super." (She also says she is all for living with a man before marrying him, "although Mummy might not be too keen because she would think that people would use the word 'loose' about such behaviour".) She has always been so deliciously prim. Perhaps now is the time for the sexed-up superbitch to come out. I wish her luck with Crossroads. I'm thinking of booking in for a weekend break. I hope it isn't full.

'Crossroads', ITV1, weekdays at 5pm