Joanna Scanlan: ‘Only snobs think the Larkins are naff’

“Elevating oneself to the finer, the better, is an unfashionable notion,” says Joanna Scanlan. “I know many people are looking forward to spending Christmas Day in their onesies, but I love to put on a good frock and some perfume. Get out the best china. Polish the glasses I only use once a year until they shine in the candlelight… The elegance is really important to me.”

The actress, who won a cult following for her delectably deadpan turn as clueless Terri in The Thick of It, is a delicate, thoughtful presence – quite the opposite of the “abundant, earthy” Ma Larkin, the 1950s farmer’s wife she plays in ITV’s latest adaptation of H E Bates’s Darling Buds of May novels. Whereas Ma barges merrily – elbows out – into every scene in Day-Glo synthetic fabrics, Scanlan materialises, cat-like, behind me with a questioning smile. But she “always has enormous fun” playing Ma, she tells me.

“The countryside around the organic farm where we film it is just glorious and it takes me right back to [childhood visits to] my grandmother’s house. In that period, she would have been the same age as Ma, and my mother would have been the same age as [the Larkins’ daughter] Mariette. Like Mariette, she was also obsessed with France. Well, it was the thing then. Nouvelle vague. The Left Bank. That was where all the thrilling, modern ideas were happening.”

Now 60, Scanlan is finally earning recognition in serious dramas (she just won the best actress prize at the British Independent Film Awards for her devastating performance as a bigamist’s widow in Aleem Khan’s After Love). But her body shape meant she spent years being offered only comedy roles. “And in comedy,” she tells me, curling herself into the plush velvet seat of a Mayfair hotel, “the rule is generally that the funnier the show, the more stressful the shoot. Filming The Thick of It was incredibly hard work: fast and furious, with no time to laugh, really.”

By contrast, on the set of The Larkins’ Christmas special, “we all laughed a lot. The Larkins live in a sort of perpetual Christmas, don’t they? They’re all about family, generosity, every surface groaning under the weight of all that delicious food. Pop Larkin’s a kind of Father Christmas, always laughing and handing out presents. Ma has this warm, feminine, reconciling spirit that will bring things together. They’re the ‘perfick’ model of hospitality.”

Raised in a hotel in North Wales, Scanlan knows all about the “theatre of hospitality” that the staff enact for the guests. “It might be refined, or hip, or very rude – like at Fawlty Towers. Behind the scenes, it’s always another story. That was certainly the case at our hotel: one side was genteel and beautiful and respectable and the other was: ‘Let’s get p---ed!’”

Scanlan’s father wouldn’t let her work in the hotel’s boozy side, but she loved playing waitress on the posh side. “In the mid-1970s, the pace of life was slower,” she says. “The local solicitors, accountants, shop owners would all come in for lunch and have a couple of gin and tonics, a light bar lunch and a long conversation.” She even tried her hand at silver service: “All that fiddly stuff with the fingers, two spoons and the lid. It was an art!”

On childhood trips to London, she enjoyed scrutinising the staff at the capital’s classiest venues. “We’d take tea at the Ritz and once went for Christmas lunch at the Savoy,” Scanlan says. “It was the greatest thrill of our lives. We had real turtle soup, which I’m ashamed of now. Although it was 1971 so I can forgive myself, maybe. Then a roast with all the trimmings. I remember course after course of tinkling, twinkling gorgeousness. I was determined to bring this “top of the tree” spirit back to the Castle Hotel, Ruthin.”

It was also in her mid-teens that Scanlan fell in love with H E Bates. “People think they know those books, but they don’t,” she says. “They’ve just absorbed the clichés. The snobs think he’s naff, but he’s bloody well not. I love the literary sharpness of him! I totally get it…” She reaches across the table to flip through my copy of The Darling Buds of May. “Let’s pick a sentence at random. Ah! Look: ‘The Brigadier, under indeterminate protest, had a second whisky and soda.’” She shakes her head. “Indeterminate! Brilliant. I love how Kriss Dosanjh plays him with that humility at odds with grandiosity.”

Some viewers have complained about the “unhistorical” casting of actors such as Dosanjh in The Larkins – which features a non-white head teacher, postman, shopkeeper, house buyer and tax inspector. But for Scanlan, “the diversity is absolutely in the spirit of the characters. At the heart of Bates’s stories you’ll find a generosity of spirit and a belief in equality. That’s why I think it’s important that our modern show reflects our modern demographic. We’re not attempting to make historically accurate TV. Bates’s ‘Larkinworld’ was always an idealised version of the world.”

Scanlan loved acting at her convent school, where the nuns mounted elaborate Christmas shows (no nativities!), but she struggled with the stuffy culture of Footlights while at Cambridge. There she became great friends with Tilda Swinton, both ending up in court when she drove Swinton’s car without insurance in her mid-20s.

After graduation, Scanlan taught a university performing arts course instead of “getting on with being an actress”. She went on to work for the Arts Council while writing her own scripts and taking bit parts: a midwife in soap Peak Practice (1997), a dental assistant in sitcom My Family (2001), another midwife in The Other Boleyn Girl (2008).

Today, she tells me: “For many years, the message to women was: if you want to succeed as a writer or a producer then you do have to be really nice and acquiesce to male opinion. You were encouraged to use ‘womanly wiles’,” she rolls her eyes, “instead of direct communication. For years and years, I had to try to pretend I agreed with opinions I didn’t necessarily agree with, and that isn’t my nature. I’m actually direct. It was hard. When we were working on Getting On, me and Vicki Pepperdine were the only women writers with a BBC commission. The only ones! I’m so glad that is changing.” Next year, Scanlan is thrilled to be appearing as snuff-taking aristocrat Isabella “Tib” Norcliffe in the second series of Gentleman Jack, written and directed by Sally Wainwright.

Although Scanlan would love to get back to writing, she tells me “the acting roles I’m being offered now are just too good. And I’ve waited long enough for them!” At the moment, she is filming a six-part psychological thriller called The Light in the Hall. “It’s set in Wales and we’re filming it in both English and Welsh, which is hard!”

But, as ever, she has enjoyed being a fly on the wall at a hotel. “Actors get to stay in hotels much longer than other people,” she says. “You’re there way beyond the expiry date of the performance staff put on as the beautiful, anonymous service machine. The fiction always falls apart and you get to see the gritty human realities. I love that collapse, when you get to know the staff and they’re sobbing on your shoulder about how they couldn’t sell a caravan to pay for Uncle Tom’s kidney operation or whatever.”

For the festivities, Scanlan is back in London, where she will be roasting an organic chicken (from the farm on which The Larkins is set) for her husband and her brother’s family. “While I love all the food and noise and family, I genuinely feel that each Christmas, I need to seek out some time for quiet, private contemplation,” she tells me. “That’s when I can feel the potential for transformation. A crisp, sharp snap of the spirit in which I can dare to rethink things.

“The Christian version tells us: today, a baby is born. This baby gives us the opportunity of pure redemption for everything we’ve done wrong. The pagan Yuletide rituals tell us: we’re at the darkest, deepest, most profoundly empty time of the year. But that emptiness provides the perfect opportunity for growth. Seeds are coming up. Bulbs are stirring. We can’t see any of it yet, but new life and light is on its way.”

The Larkins is on ITV at 9pm on Christmas Day; Scanlan was photographed at Flemings Mayfair Hotel, London, W1J 7BH