I always look beautiful on Zoom–I hide my glasses in the bread bin before dialling in!

A timely burst of cheery wit from MAUREEN LIPMAN

WE ARE only a fortnight into lockdown, but I’m already out of patience with the ‘cute’ videos, the ‘musical’ videos and, particularly, the ‘hilarious’ videos now being shared online. If I have to read one more diary of a self-isolated, selfdeprecating soul, I’m going to head out and queue up, too close, to someone as vulnerable as me.

They’re nothing but Smugness Diaries: ‘Here I am in my PJs eating cinnamon porridge and watching a box-set of The Wire. The kids have gone feral, Anoushka’s re-lined the cutlery drawers. We’ve got a supermarket slot for 6.30 on Wednesday week…’

I’ve stood in my little courtyard clapping for healthcare workers at 8pm on Thursdays, feeling as intensely moved as others, yet wondering why don’t we just donate a pound a clap instead?

But dystopian and disturbing though this lockdown is, being in self-isolation is not that different from being a resting actor. Which is what I am now because Coronation Street (in which I play the acid-tongued granny Evelyn Plummer) has put filming on hold.

Should my innate masochism kick in, I can still watch myself in episodes a couple of times a week, looking haggard yet feisty, but I choose instead to settle down with Call My Agent, the French series on Netflix about a talent agency.

This week, my partner – self-isolating elsewhere – phoned to tell me I had turned up on his TV in an episode of Midsomer Murders. It was a minor role and one of my forgettable lines was: ‘Be immortal for as long as you live, Sergeant, because nothing is more certain in life than that it will end in death.’

LIKE all the jobs I’ve got badly wrong in my career, Midsomer Murders seems to be screened at least once a month, just to taunt me. The worst of these jobs has to be National Lampoon’s European Vacation, starring Chevy Chase – and momentarily featuring me.

It was the mid-Eighties when I spent one deeply depressing afternoon in bed with the great man in a blonde wig – me, not him. In the script, his character hits the sack with the wrong woman, only to realise his mistake when he catches sight of my beaky little face. Chase was not best pleased when I, scenting extra comedy, wrapped my legs around him as he tried to get out of the bed.

He told the fragile director that it was unacceptable. She mumbled something about it being quite funny, but he extricated himself rapidly and words were hissed.

It was so embarrassing. Particularly when I did it again on the next take. I can’t remember what happened after that and I’ve never seen the film. But everyone I’ve ever met in a bus or at an airport most definitely has: ‘Saw you in National Lamp...’ ‘Yes! Thank you.’

‘I love Chevy Chase – what was he like to work with?’

‘Fabulous! We’re still in touch. Best buddies! Bye.’

So, enough digressions. How am I keeping myself busy?

Well, without describing my Himalayan salt-gargling routine, thereby turning this into another smugfest diary, I can only tell you that, aside from missing my kids so much that my solar plexus aches, I have found that freedom from ambition is very liberating.

I’ve seized on this period of house arrest to make some videos for my grandchildren, aged seven and five. It all started on a recent solitary walk, when I accidentally took a selfie and realised that, thanks to the unusual angle, it looked like I had a tree growing out of my head.

And so I sent a video message to my grandkids: ‘I don’t want to worry you but I have a big tree growing out of my head. Can you advise me what to do, because it’s really heavy and I don’t know how to get home?’

They replied with their own video. Sacha, aged five: ‘Er Momo… The tree is not growing out of your head! Just get up and walk away.’

And so it began. I soon found myself in another perilous situation: trapped in a yoga mat. ‘Momo, there is a solution,’ responds Sacha. ‘Put one hand on one end of the mat and the other on the other side and just pull them apart…’

Cue truly helpless giggling from his sister Ava. It’s hard to believe that, even in the face of imminent doom, one can still wake up funny.

Funny videos apart, contact with grandkids is restricted to a nightly conversation on the video-conferencing app Zoom. We all sit neatly in our screens, with our hands in our laps, and everyone looks extremely beautiful – particularly me, because I hide my glasses in the bread bin before dialling in.

Seder night, the first night of Passover, on Zoom, was touching. But I also imagined 240,000 technophobe Jews cursing at computer screens across Britain: ‘I’ve got it! The picture’s suddenly gone!’

Sacha and Ava haven’t yet responded to my latest video, in which my face is trapped in a toiletry bag. But I fear they’ll soon be as bored with my comic offerings as I am by friends sending me daft images on the internet. And then, oh Lord, how will I entertain them? What will I think of next?