TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER.
Well, me and Steph are playing a pair of con ladies, and we got caught. We don’t really fit in with the rest of them quite honestly. Bev doesn’t think she’s superior, she just thinks she’s a bit arty! They’ll probably fit in eventually but they’re doing scams on everybody within the prison. Bev’s a bit crafty, not to be trusted, which is a bit sad really, because you can still meet quite nice people in a prison.

IT’S QUITE AN IMAGE CHANGE FOR YOU…
Yes - it just sort have happened on the day – we just went for it. I thought ‘I can’t look like Alma, they can’t have me looking like I looked for 15 years’. It would have been like I’d come back from the dead… So I changed my image – I’ve become a redhead!

I’ve made no attempt to look good. Not that Alma always looked good either, but nobody will recognise me in this. I’ve stripped off at least half of the make-up that I would usually wear. I look terrible. I’ve decided that I’m going to age in front of the camera, on television. In this I’m supposed to be sort of arty, and a bit odd. Clothes-wise, I sometimes think that I look like a walking settee.

HOW DOES IT DIFFER FROM CORONATION STREET?
Filming is so unlike Coronation Street because on the Street, you have multi-cameras, so each scene is filmed from several angles at once. But with Bad Girls it’s a single camera, more like making a film. So the amount of hours that you put in are the same - but the actual process of making an hour of television is just slower, much slower.

ARE YOU ENJOYING IT?
Very much so. It’s the nicest set, with the nicest crew, that I’ve ever worked on. I love it, I really do. I’m also now a complete fan of Bad Girls! The trouble was when I was doing Coronation Street, I got deprived of watching television because that was when I was learning lines. But I was sent some tapes when I was coming into the series, and I got so hooked I kept ringing up and saying ‘Can you send us some more episodes?’ So I’m now a complete fan of Bad Girls. I love it.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR CHARACTER?
Bev can be a bit vicious I suppose - I mean I was terrible to poor Denny, really. Mrs Hollamby definitely comes in for it. And all those terrible things that we do to get hold of alcohol. Alcohol is terribly important to Phyl and Bev…

DO YOU LIKE PLAYING A BADDIE?
It’s fun to be playing a bad girl… I’ve always erred on the side of being bad! I got expelled from my school. The only time I was actually caught up with the law was when I was a chorus girl. Of course the chorus never had their names on the show posters, and so one night on my way home I wrote my name on this poster. I felt a tap on my shoulder and it was a policeman. He took me to the police station, and then took me back, with a rubber, to rub my name off…