'Whoever is sanctioning topless auditions in Game of Thrones should be buried alive!'

"I think writers are considering older actors much more,” says Alison Steadman, the veteran British actress perhaps best known as Beverly, the formidable hostess from Mike Leigh’s acclaimed 1977 stage and TV play Abigail’s Party, or as loveable Pam from Noughties sitcom Gavin & Stacey. “It’s not all about twentysomethings and love and sex; it’s about characters and the world that we live in – and that encompasses everything from a newborn baby to a 98-year-old.

“I remember approaching 40 and my contemporaries were all saying, ‘If you can get through the 40 barrier, you might do all right.’ At that age, your career usually sank to nothing. That has changed.” 

Illustrative of this positive shift is Broken Biscuits, a new BBC pilot written and directed by The Royle Family’s co-creator and star Craig Cash as part of the BBC’s Comedy Playhouse season. At the age of 69, Steadman joins a distinguished British cast, including Timothy West (81), Stephanie Cole (74) and Alun Armstrong (69).

Steadman recalls reading the script and immediately falling in “love” with her finickity character Brenda – one half of the proud proprietor couple of the “Brenroger” B&B (for pronunciation, think Hyacinth Bucket).  

Television comedy has of course changed a great deal since Steadman made her small-screen debut back in the Seventies. “When I first started we had four channels, and now we’ve got 104,” she explains. “In some ways it’s great, because you’ve got a much wider choice and writers have got a bigger canvas, but in other ways there isn’t the same focus. 

“There was a time when a comedy would be on the television and the next day you’d go to work and ask, ‘Did you see it last night, wasn’t it funny?’ Now it can take months for that to happen, with people using catch-up.” 

Ironically, the most popular sitcom on TV right now – Mrs Brown’s Boys – harks back to the theatricality of early TV comedy, evoking the ribald, working-class spirit of shows such as On the Buses. “Mrs Brown’s Boys is so clever and different,” Steadman says. “I love the fact that they involve the audience, you can see the cameras at the end of the show and they all take a bow like they’re in the theatre.”

In recent years, actors such as Julie Walters have spoken about a perceived disadvantage to people from working-class backgrounds trying to make it in the industry. However, Steadman, who was born in Liverpool, where her father worked for an electronics firm and her mother was a housewife, thinks times have changed. “It’s not like it was,” she explains, “particularly in theatre. When people auditioned for Rada, say, unless they spoke in a received pronunciation voice, they wouldn’t get a place. There was no room for anyone from Oldham, or wherever.” 

The past few decades have also seen a noticeable rise in the amount of flesh being bared on screen. When I ask Steadman what she thinks about reports of women going topless for Game of Thrones auditions, she is shocked. “That is absolutely appalling,” she says. “It sounds like those awful strip clubs in the Fifties or Sixties in Soho. Whoever is sanctioning that should be buried – alive, if possible!” 

Much of Steadman’s work has long outlived the era in which it was made, as evidenced by an encounter she had with a fan in a supermarket a few years ago. “A girl stopped me and said, ‘My brother is longing to meet you,’” Steadman recalls. “I turned round and there was this really shy 12-year-old standing there. I asked if he was a Gavin & Stacey fan and she said, ‘No, Nuts in May – he’s crazy about it!’ This was something I did in 1975!” 

This week Steadman appeared on a celebrity special of The Great British Bake Off. “My friends said, ‘Oh my God, you’ve met Mary Berry!’” Steadman laughs. “You work with all these people and they’re never bothered, but because I met Mary Berry everyone’s falling over backwards!” 

After nearly 50 years in the industry, Steadman’s enthusiasm for her work shows no signs of waning. “Listen, it’s nice to have a bit of down time,” she says, “but if it was to end altogether – oh, I’d be so sad. Because it’s me, that’s what makes me and always has.”

Broken Biscuits is on Friday at 10.35pm on BBC One

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