It may be one of the most devastating scenes in the history of British television. In the final series of Happy Valley, Catherine Cawood begins to understand that her sister Clare has betrayed her, and has been lying about where she is. Catherine watches Clare from outside a cafe, then walks in, sits down at Clare’s table and says one iconic word: “Hiya.”
Siobhan Finneran, who played Clare for a decade, pops up on my laptop screen. Surely there is only one way to start the conversation. “Hiya,” I deadpan, in my best Sarah Lancashire voice.
“Hiya,” Finneran says, cheerfully.
“No,” I say, and try again. “Hiya.”
She smiles politely. Surely you get “hiya” all the time? “Where’s that from? Benidorm?” she asks.
Finneran is perched on a floral sofa, vape in hand. She stopped smoking six months ago, and this has helped keep her off the cigarettes. “Oh, it’s revolting, darlin,” she says. (She says darling a lot, more a northern “darlin” than a luvvie’s “dahling”). Finneran grew up in Oldham and still lives in Saddleworth. “I keep buying the worst ones in the vain hope that I’ll stop. This is called Strawberry Ice.” She giggles. “Absolutely ridiculous. It’s embarrassing asking for them: ‘Two packets of Watermelon Surprise for me.’ Awful!” She’d much rather have a rollie, she admits. “I liked smoking, all day long. So it’s meant I’m not doing that, which is great. But at some point, it will stop. We hope.”
From Happy Valley to Downton Abbey to Alma’s Not Normal, Finneran is a fixture of quality British television. But, amazingly, despite a career so lengthy she had her first role in 1987 and spent nearly a decade in TV sitcom Benidorm, it is only now, in her late 50s, that she is about to get her first top billing in the new ITV thriller Protection. She plays DI Liz Nyles, who runs a witness protection scheme. Can it really be right that this is her first leading role on TV? “Yeah, maybe, darlin. I don’t know. Probably? I’m trying to think. It probably is.” She is clearly not bothered by it. “As long as I can get up and do my job and I can remember my words, that’s really what it’s all about, because I’m much happier, as you always are on a set, working in a team.”
I was so gripped by Protection that I was shouting at the screen. It puts practically every character, on all sides of the law, in danger, and refuses to let you trust anyone as deception builds upon deception. “That’s good, if you’re shouting at the telly. I do that all the time. You should go on Gogglebox.” Maybe she should go on Gogglebox. “But I don’t like being on telly other than playing a character. And I’m not sure people need to see me eating bags of Revels and shouting things at the telly.” She likes her private life to be private. Interviews, she says, are “like a form of torture. You haven’t got a character to hide behind. But I’ve got my vape and a glass of water, so I’m all right.”
She is happy to talk about acting, though. “Oh, I can talk to you about that, darlin, I can easily talk to you about that,” she says. Her grandmother was a seamstress who loved the theatre. As one of the oldest grandchildren, Finneran would be taken on day trips, getting the train down to the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon to see whatever was on at the time. “Something must have gone in, or something must have excited me, or there was something I was fascinated by,” she says. She always knew, somehow, that acting was what she’d always wanted to do. “But I didn’t really understand how you got into it.”
A careers adviser nudged her towards what was then Oldham Technical College, and its theatre studies A-level course. Jane Horrocks went there. Sarah Lancashire was a couple of years above her. “We did think we were like the kids from Fame. We’d do music, dancing, singing, and then we’d do acting.” She was there for two years, and when she left, did “bog standard jobs” for a while. Through a friend’s mum, she heard about a casting call for a film called Rita, Sue and Bob Too. She was 19 when she got the part of Rita. The now celebrated British film, about a married man who has an affair with two schoolgirls, was written by the late Andrea Dunbar, who adapted it from her play, and was set and filmed on an estate in Bradford. It was 40 years ago, she points out. “And I can’t remember what I had for my breakfast! I just remember it being a bit of a blur. I was probably terrified every day. It was like another language. It was another world, completely, that I knew nothing about.”
For a long time after that, she didn’t act at all, even though it seems, to the casual observer, as if she’s been working solidly ever since. “That’s a really great myth,” she laughs, good-naturedly. Over the years, she did the soaps (Coronation Street and Emmerdale), plenty of dramas and a handful of early Sally Wainwright shows. “I’ve only been in work consistently, I would say, for the last 19 years. I’ve done the complete opposite to a lot of people. I hit 40, and started to pick up regular characters, as opposed to three lines as the woman who lives next door, or, you know, a scene as the sister-in-law.”
In her 30s, she did turn up as a regular in Paul Abbott’s Clocking Off, alongside her old friend Sarah Lancashire, but after that, she had another period of not working. “You sometimes look back and think, yeah, I made a decision not to work when the children were small.” She has two children, now in their late 20s. “But I don’t think I’d made a decision. I think there probably wasn’t a lot of work coming in, and that just fitted in quite brilliantly with the fact that I had two kids under the age of two.”
Towards the end of the 00s, that all began to shift. In 2007, Finneran was cast as the mouthy matriarch Janice Garvey in the hit holiday sitcom Benidorm. A couple of years later, she appeared as the vicious housekeeper Sarah O’Brien, a villain of early Downton Abbey, where she remained for three series. “People were seeing me playing the wonderful and loud and fabulous Janice Garvey in a comedy, and then they were watching me playing, again, a fabulous, but completely nasty piece of work, Miss O’Brien. I don’t know if people were sitting at home going, oh, she can do that, and she can do a bit of that. That might be what it was.”
Does she have any idea why her career took off after she turned 40? “I don’t, really. I’d never been the princess. A lot of the actresses I know were the pretty ones who, from leaving drama school, could play the girlfriend or the pretty sister. I was never in that casting bracket.” But with Benidorm and Downton, she found her feet. “I was just very lucky that those two jobs, that were so very different, were happening around the same time. It’s the luck of the Irish, isn’t it?”
Finneran is from a big Irish family. “My dad’s from Ireland. My mum’s family were Irish. My mother’s father’s family was Scottish. I am a bit desperate to do one of those … what are they called?” I assume she means the BBC genealogy series, Who Do You Think You Are?, but when I suggest that, she hoots. “No! I do love watching that, and I’m nosy enough to want to find out more about my family. But I mean those DNA tests,” she laughs.
In recent years, she has appeared in two knockout shows. She remembers getting the script for the first three episodes of Happy Valley. “I couldn’t breathe, reading those scripts. I sometimes lose the will to live, reading [scripts], because you just think, what is this? That’s me being really brutally honest. But with that, I remember ringing my agent the next day and going; ‘Oh my God, it is fucking brilliant.’” It meant she got to work with Lancashire again. “I love working with Sarah. We have a good time together. And I think that sisters relationship is just so true to life. One minute, they’re literally spitting at each other and the next they’re making each other a cup of tea and having a chat.”
And then there was Alma’s Not Normal, in which she plays Lin, Alma’s mother and another long-term addict with mental health issues, who is repeatedly let down by social services and the state. “It’s like I’ve said about Happy Valley: you get a script like that, and you’d have to have some serious holiday booked, or you’d cancel a holiday for that. You just go, this is a work of genius.”
She was scared of playing Lin at first, because the character is “very, very big”.“If you think about an unfiltered, unedited six-year-old, it’s sort of that energy. She does say exactly what she thinks about things, and it’s probably what everybody else is thinking. She just says it. She’s honest. And what I love about her is that she’s optimistic, still. She’s still got hope. And you think, how the fuck, when you’ve been treated the way she’s been treated? That’s massively appealing to me, in another human being.”
I wonder if Finneran feels optimistic about the gloomy state of British television. Amid budgets cuts and slashed production rates, what does she think the future holds? “I don’t understand that, in terms of the production companies. From my point of view, what I see is really brilliant actor mates of mine who are not getting any work. I’ve never known the industry be as bleak, in terms of that. And I mean people who consistently have worked for the last 30 years, who’ve spent the last two or three years with nothing.” She hopes it will pick up soon. “We’ve been told for the past two years that it was down to the strikes in America, and that next year will be better. Well, we’re now two years on from that, and it doesn’t seem to be picking up. I don’t want to sound like a wanker saying that, because I have had work, so I know there’s stuff being made. But I just know there’s not the quantity of work that was being made maybe even five years ago.”
I don’t think you sound like a wanker. “Well, that’s good,” she says. “But it’s tough out there. And for kids starting off now, fucking hell, I don’t know. So many regional theatres closing and all of that.” She pauses, vape still in hand. “We just have to be optimistic, don’t we? We have to be a bit more like Lin. Less editing of ourselves, and far more optimistic about the world.”
Protection is on ITV1 and ITVX on 16 March.
