Doon Mackichan on Toast of London, Jon Hamm and new BBC comedy drama Two Doors Down

“In the 1980s I used to be on at the Comedy Store with five guys and then I’d get an agent ringing me up and saying, ‘It’s International Women’s Day, I’ll put you on with Jo Brand and Jenny Eclair and Hattie Hayridge,’ because we were the four women doing the circuit. It’s pretty similar now. You don’t get four women on a bill on the same night,” she says.

“I think it has changed in that women are doing more character-based and more sketch-based comedy and I would hope that came from Smack the Pony. There were a lot of women going, ‘I love this, it is a voice for what I want to do. I want to be silly.’”

Mackichan says she never ceases to be astonished at the number of sketch shows and women’s shows that go so far and are then dropped. “It’s time for commissioners, women and men, to face up to that. There are so many good performers around who don’t get the chance. They use the same people. People are probably sick of seeing me. They’ll be saying, ‘Why are you using Doon again?’”

Probably because she’s one of the best comedy actresses of her generation. However, I take her point: little has changed. Which is why Two Doors Down, the six-part comedy which also stars Alex Norton, Jonathan Watson, Jamie Quinn and Harki Bhambra, which first aired as a New Year special in 2013, particularly appeals to her.

Doon Mackichan and Jonathan Watson

The comedy of manners follows friends and neighbours in fictional Latimer Crescent, with Mackichan’s glam character Cathy playing a central role. Her wardrobe usually consists of designer clothes accessorised with lots of bling jewellery but for the scene being filmed today at the BBC’s Dumbarton studios she’s wearing a rather old-fashioned nightie.

“Normally Cathy is very sparkly. If there was the Real Housewives of Dumbarton, she would be on that because she has the hair and the big false lashes,” laughs Mackichan. “She’s loud, probably drinks one too many at a party, and she’s quite narcissistic and self-centred. She’s actually very happily married to her husband, they’ve been together since she was quite young.

“She’s like a big butterfly in a domestic situation: everything is a drama. She doesn’t work and I think they’re probably up to their eyes in credit. She’s very interested in everyone but she is over-interested in everyone’s business: she wants to know exactly what is going on, she’s nosy but also just wants to talk about herself. She’ll say, ‘Tell me all about it. Let’s have a glass of wine and a catch up’ and she’ll just talk about herself.” 

Many of us are familiar with Mackichan’s other glitzy on-screen character – theatrical agent Jane Plough (pronounced "pluff") in Channel 4’s Toast of London. Terribly polite, but with no soft side, Plough gently but firmly strong-arms Matt Berry’s pompous actor Steven Toast into a string of unsuitable roles.

Matt Berry and Doon Mackichan

“She is an absolute joy to play,” says Mackichan, revealing that Plough’s distinctive hairsprayed coiffure was inspired by the bridge partner of Mackichan’s mother, who happens to be June Whitfield’s sister.

“They’re all women who are those brilliant survival ladies of a certain age who just would never wear an elasticated waistband. They look good, they put their makeup on, they’ll get together, and they’re inspirational. They have all lost their husbands but they will get up, make a meal and get on with it. They’re brilliant.” Filming the third series of Toast of London, which aired late last year, also gave Mackichan, who is 53, the opportunity to work with Jon Hamm, a noted fan of British comedy, who appeared as himself.

“We were all slightly ridiculous in the makeup wagon because we were trying to be really cool and he was just sitting there and people were knocking things over and going, ‘What the f*** are you doing? Calm down, let’s be cool,'” she giggles.

“He is ridiculously cool and even on set I was trying to sit quietly and thought, ‘I don’t have to speak because he’s not speaking.’ And then, of course, filling the silence with utter crap like, ‘Do you, have, ahem, bars like this is, em, in LA?’”

Beyond the cut-glass voice, Mackichan has a very good Scottish accent, the product of spending her teenage years at school in St Andrews. Fiercely proud of her Scottish roots – her family can trace its origins to the Macdonalds of Clanranald – she has been loving the weeks spent in Glasgow filming. Not least because the late summer schedule with unseasonably balmy days offered the chance to combine a trip to Scotland with her favourite pastime: wild swimming.

As well as taking a dip in the waters off Arran, she went to Croy beach at Culzean Castle and even managed to get some of her fellow cast members from Two Doors Down into Loch Lomond on a break in filming. “They were like, ‘We’re not going in’, and I said, ‘Yes we are, we’re going in. Get your costume,'” she laughs. “I’ve never seen them look so happy. They were like, ‘Ooh, it’s life changing.' I absolutely love it when people are scared of open water and get over their fear.”

She has swam the English Channel to raise money to put on a show at the Edinburgh Fringe, but it was a short late-night dip in the water at Hastings, where she lives, on the night of her 50th birthday party that proved memorable for all the wrong reasons.

“I got stung by a weever fish. It was the most painful thing I have ever experienced, bearing in mind I’ve swam the Channel and given birth without pain relief. Being the bossy leader, I had to swim drunk people around the harbour arm and was thinking, ‘This is getting so bad I don’t know what to do with myself,’” she remembers.

“I didn’t go to A&E, I just drank rum and danced until five in the morning. My foot swelled up like a beehive. Apparently grown men cry – surfers in Australia – and that made me feel better.”

A very different form of wild swimming kept Mackichan entertained after long days of filming in Dumbarton: on the trapeze rings above the swimming pool at Glasgow’s Western Baths, which she described as “the most favourite thing I’ve ever done in my life”.

This particular revelation came out after a question about a talk she gave at Hay-on-Wye Festival in 2015 focusing on the depiction of sexual violence against women in film and television. Elaine C Smith’s masseuse, recommended to ease the muscles after Mackichan’s mid-air adventures, had watched a video clip of the talk and Mackichan was surprised and delighted that someone had filmed the event and posted it online. The speech was later published in the New Statesman.

Though she had never done anything like this before, the mother of three with two daughters says she was called to action by the amount of crime dramas and the extent of sexual violence. “I got to the point where I thought, ‘I cannot watch another woman running through a forest or on a slab. I’ve reached my zero tolerance.’ I don’t need to see another rape or hear about it. We are a nation obsessed with crime and I love a good psychological thriller or a crime novel but it’s the way it’s done,” she says.

What Mackichan originally thought would be a chat with a Q&A turned into a half-hour speech, mostly written when she was on location in Bulgaria filming comedy series Plebs. “I was staying in a hotel that I would call the sex workers’ mafia hotel. It was full of what looked like 16-year-old girls and horrible old men. It was so awful that it galvanised me to get it down on paper.”

The actor is clear that she will turn down a script that is graphic or where she thinks violence is unnecessary, and describes a “DCI hard-nosed cop” character she was offered. She was disappointed to say the least to learn that four of the series’ six episodes involved violence against women.

“Maybe think of some other stories we can tell? Women are just exhausted, we don’t need to see that any more, we need to see some really positive heroine stories, buddy girl stories,” she offers. “Yes, it happens, but it doesn’t mean you have to consistently show it as the reason to make it good drama.

“Men and women screenwriters need to really address that quite seriously, the fact they think they have to do that to get commissions. We don’t want to see it any more. We don’t want to feel deflated at the end of something. We want to feel empowered.”

Sally Phillips, Doon Mackichan and Fiona Allen in Smack the Pony (Image: Channel 4)

From Smack the Pony to the National Theatre and stand-up to winning a Fringe First Award in Edinburgh for a one-woman show which not only chronicled the period when her then 11-year-old son was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukaemia but also found humour in it all, there don’t appear to be many boxes left for Mackichan to tick.

There is one, however. She wants to go back to her roots on the west coast of Scotland – quite literally.

“I want to do all that research, I would love to do a programme. My family came from Ardnamurchan originally. I want to explore that whole area, but I haven’t had time. That’s my next pitch: please can I come back and travel around the west coast?”

Two Doors Down is on BBC Two on April 1 at 10pm.