Rebecca Front: 'If the Westminster sex scandals were in The Thick of It, no one would believe it'

Rebecca Front, the whip-smart comic actor, is bewildered, her brow knitting itself into a frown, her large, expressive eyes widening into a gesture of confusion.

With her stripes earned on hit shows such as The Day Today and The Thick of It – for which she won a Bafta playing hapless cabinet minister and leader of the oppostion, Nicola Murray – she now finds real-life current affairs out-parodying anything satirical she has ever appeared in.

“If you made this stuff up,” she says, “nobody would believe it.”

By “this stuff”, she means, for example, the parlous Brexit negotiations, Theresa May’s party conference coughing fit, the ongoing scandals about sex pests in the corridors of Westminster – all subjects that, given her career history and her large dose of Oxford educated smarts, she’s asked about on a daily basis.

“I’ve been asked to write about the current political landscape, but I’m keeping out of it because, quite honestly, I don’t know what the heck’s going on,” she admits. “I read the papers and I’m a total news junkie, but, still, I can’t understand the half of it.”

Just as well, perhaps, that this self-confessed workaholic is currently at work on a raft of projects well outside the political sphere.

Over the coming months, for example, she’ll be publishing a follow-up to her book, Curious – a collection of personal stories and anecdotes that was shortlisted for a National Book Award – and, much to her own amusement, you’ll see her playing an “all-action” character alongside Uma Thurman in the Hollywood ghost story, Down a Dark Hall.

On top of that, there are three TV projects to mention: she’s currently filming a role as Lady Whitworth, a new character in the popular BBC series Poldark, and will be one of the contestants in an ITV Christmas Day special, All Stars Musical – a kind of Strictly Come Singing, in which celebrities, including the likes of Sir Tony Robinson to Denise Lewis, are teamed up with a professional and trained to perform a musical number in front of a live audience.

“We’ve already recorded it, but if I told you who won, I’d have to kill you,” she laughs.

Before that, however, there’s the series that we’re meeting her in the bar of London’s Langham Hotel to discuss a new Kay Mellor drama, which begins this week on BBC One.

Love, Lies and Records revolves around a group of register office workers dealing with the big moments of other people’s lives – birth, marriage and death. “But, like all Kay’s characters, they also have quite messy, complicated lives of their own.”

Front plays Judy, a socially awkward jobsworth hell-bent on revenge when her colleague Kate (played by Ashley Jensen) is promoted above her. Po-faced, morally judgmental and humourless, she is the antithesis of the ebullient, self-mocking actress now before us.

“I doubt we’d ever be friends,” Front admits. “But, at the same time, I didn’t want to play her like the Wicked Witch of the West. There’s a slightly tragic side to her, too, and a sense that she’s spiralled into a situation she never really intended to happen.

“I found her quite puzzling, which always attracts me, because the worse thing is playing a character that you can sum up in just two words. But thanks to writers like Kay Mellor, we’re now nudging towards a time when roles for women are more interesting and three-dimensional, although I wouldn’t say we’re completely there yet.”

Recent revelations about film producer Harvey Weinstein and others abusing their power over women in her business show how slow progress has been in other areas, too. Now aged 53, she herself must have been a young actress during the worst years of the couching cast era, and yet she says she was unscathed.

“Looking back, I suppose, I was just so fortunate that the influential men I worked with early on in my career – including people like Armando Iannucci (the writer and producer of Alan Partridge who later cast her in The Thick of It) were universally respectful, supportive and lovely. And that’s not just actress-y waffle, it’s the truth,” she says.

Comparing the recent spate of revelations about sexual assaults on women working in Westminster with those on what Front refers to as “‘hashtag-me-too’ actresses” in Hollywood, she admits there are certain problems peculiar to showbusiness. “For starters, we don’t have an HR department to police things, and there are no strict rules governing the process of auditioning. It’s not like going to an interview at a bank. 

“Plus, of course, if you’re young and you’re new and you don’t want your career to be ruined or to have someone powerful say that it’s your word against theirs, then you find yourself in an utter minefield.”

Frost seems delighted to now be beyond the vulnerable, ingénue years herself. “I think there are real benefits to getting older,” she says. “And the confidence to deal with difficult situations is one of them.”

Front speaks as someone who has suffered a lifetime of anxiety disorders. Eventually, cognitive behavioural therapy helped her to deal with claustrophobia, hypochondria and fear of every form of public transport. “Trains and planes, I’ve just about conquered,” she says, happily. “I still won’t travel in a lift or go on the Underground, but I’m an awful lot better than I was.” 

She hesitates to describe it as a “battle”. “I mean, there are people who suffer massive mental health issues all their lives, whereas mine – getting panicky in certain situations, as unpleasant as it is – feels a bit ‘first world’ in comparison.

“And, yet, I talk about it because I want others to know it’s not normal for anxieties to limit the way you live. More important, if this is you, there’s help available and, really, the worst thing you can do is nothing. In my experience, anxiety disorders don’t get better on their own, in fact they spread.”

Aside from a brilliant therapist, that she still sees for occasional top-ups – “a bit like seeing your hairdresser”, Front credits her home life and happy marriage to the producer Phil Clymer, for so much of her stability.

“I have a husband who’s both honest and loyal and gives brilliant advice, but at the same time keeps me completely grounded,” she says.

For example, he famously waved her off to her first day of work as Nicola Murray in The Thick of It with the words: “Don’t f--- it up, it’s my favourite show.”

“Similarly, if I come home full of angst about something – a scene we’ve been shooting that day, for example – he’ll be like: ‘Sure, that sounds terrible… but can we move on, because the football is on in minute?’” she laughs.

The couple met in the late 1980s when Front auditioned for the English drama department of the BBC World Service. “I sent a tape and 12 producers had to listen to it. I heard I’d got the job, but only 11 of them had wanted to employ me. Later, after we married, I discovered Phil was the 12th. He’d thought she sounded too posh, although, in fact, she was raised in a middle-class Jewish family. Her mother, Sheila wrote children’s books, her father Charles, illustrated them.

“Mum and Dad both spoke well, but I went to school in Gants Hill and I’d worked so hard to sound as posh as I did and to iron out that Essex accent,” she says.

The couple now have two children, Oliver, 18 and Tilly, 16. Having a teenage daughter, she says, is like having your own personal stylist. “She does my make up, helps me choose my clothes. And if I say ‘Well, I don’t know if I can get away with wearing that…’, she’ll say: ‘Why on earth not? Would you say that to me?’ It has done absolute wonders for my confidence.”

Frost is happier in her skin now, in her fifties, than in any other decade. “Yes, we still exist in a society that’s in the thrall of youth and beauty, but, honestly, has there ever been a better time to be a middle-aged woman? You can still be seen as a attractive, you can dress well, you can have great hair, you’re not expected to wear flat shoes and twin sets and have a shampoo and set. It’s marvellous, isn’t it?”

Just recently, she says, she and Phil hosted a Sunday lunch for 15 friends – “one of our favourite things to do” – and she recalls looking at the women around the table.

“All of them were in their fifties or sixties and all were drop dead gorgeous. They weren’t just ‘not bad considering’ – they were funny, smart, strong, sexy, confident and beautiful.”

A perfect description of Rebecca Front herself.

Love, Lies and Records starts on Thursday November 16 on BBC One, 9pm. All Stars Musical is on ITV1 on Christmas Day