It’s great fun being the queen of mean
Vicki Pepperdine’s characters aren’t very likeable – and she loves that, she tells Simon Button
SHE PLAYED an uptight hospital consultant in Getting On and control freak mother Fiona in Camping. So what attracts Vicki Pepperdine to these less than sympathetic sitcom characters?
“They’re more fun,” she muses. “I enjoy giving hints as to why they might be that way, exploring the vulnerability within them and the history that’s made them who they are.a lot of the time people are unlikeable because they’ve had a tough time.”
Vicki, 58, is game for anything – as she proved with her spot of performance art in a very tight leotard opposite on-screen husband Steve Pemberton in Camping.
“Oh my gosh,” she laughs. “That was traumatic, I can’t lie. But Steve was game so I just thought ‘S** it’ and you always really want to go for the funny.”
Funny versus offensive is something she finds herself mulling over more in these PC times. “Sometimes you have to take a risk,” says Vicki, who also plays Princess Anne in the new series of The Windsors. “And sometimes you have to say, ‘I think it’s funny but other people might not’ and take it out. Everybody’s walking a fine line at the moment, but I feel it’s just a phase that has to be gone through, when everybody’s feeling quite sensitive.”
Which probably explains the gentler comedy-drama of The Trouble With Maggie Cole, starting this week.
Vicki plays school secretary Karen in the fictional coastal town of Thurlbury who has a crush on headmaster Peter Cole (Mark
Heap) even though he’s married to Maggie (Dawn French). Has she gone for “unlikeable” again?
“Karen’s very officious and likes telling people what to do.
She doesn’t have that much power but likes to think she does. She’s just a bit tragic because she’s in her 50s with a schoolgirl crush.”
She loves the show, she says, thanks to the clever writing,
Devon and Cornwall locations and “fabulous co-stars” – including French who, as
Maggie, causes upset when she dishes the dirt on the locals to a radio reporter.
French is one of Vicki’s heroes but they’d not worked together before. “I felt like
I’d met her though. It was probably that thing where you’ve seen somebody so much on television you kind of feel you know them.”
Could Vicki be a school secretary for real? “I’d be terrible,” she says. “I’m reasonably organised but it’s really hard work fielding parents and children and staff, with all sorts of forms and remits and goodness knows what.”
She laughs. “I did once apply to do a teacher-training course many, many moons ago and I wasn’t even invited in for an interview.” Education’s loss is comedy’s gain.vicki was born in London to parents who worked for the NHS. “Nobody in my family was anything to do with anything that would remotely mean you might end up on the television, so it’s still a shock to me that I am.”
She’d planned on a career as a picture restorer, studying art history at the University of East Anglia, but decided it wasn’t right for her.vicki was a Help the Aged fundraiser and sold advertising before landing a place at East 15 drama school in Debden, Essex.
“After that I was hooked,” she recalls.
“But I had a strangely businesslike approach to it. My dad was a hospital administrator and I think I got my practical head from him. I gave myself five years and decided that if I couldn’t make a living from acting in that time, I’d quit.and I was fortunate enough to get job after job.”
She says being co-star and co-writer with Jo Brand on NHS sitcom Getting On was a joy.the dark comedy premiered in 2009, several years after Pepperdine’s father had died from prostate cancer. “I think he would have enjoyed it,” she says. “He’d spent all his working life walking around hospital corridors and as a child I did that with him in the holidays.”
Vicki’s mother was an occupational therapist. By the time the show came out she was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, broke her pelvis and was in hospital under heavy medication. “Then when she died five years ago I discovered she’d kept all the press cuttings about Getting On so obviously was very proud.”
The documentary-style format confused some. “Occasionally I’d get people coming up to me going ‘You work at the Bristol Royal Infirmary, don’t you?’ I was often tempted to say ‘Yes, how can I help you?’”
NOW THEY’RE more likely to ask for advice on personal matters, thanks to the success of the hit podcast Dear Joan And Jericha, which she does with fellow Camping star Julia Davis – they play fictional agony aunts dispensing very tough love about filthy-sounding sexual problems.
They originally recorded it in Julia’s kitchen as a laugh, then put it out as a podcast with little fanfare. “Suddenly we were number one in the Apple podcast chart, a total shock.we had no expectations so it’s really delightful that people have embraced it. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea but some really adore it.” Whenvicki isn’t working she loves walking, hopping on a train to Kent or the South Downs from her south-east London home. She also spends time with her actor partner Michael Gould and their two “pretty grown-up” sons. I’m surprised she mentions them as she’s never been one to talk about personal stuff in interviews. “That’s because people don’t often ask me,” she admits. “They tend to stick to the work.” I suggest that, given the characters she often plays, maybe they’re too scared to ask. “I like that idea,” she grins.
● The Trouble With Maggie Cole, ITV, 9pm, Wednesday