Alison Steadman - from Bev to Pam

When it comes to longevity and versatility, few actors can possibly compete with Alison Steadman. She must be the only person I’ve seen at the cinema, on TV and the West End stage and also on the radio. On the radio? Yes, I was in the live audience for a 2004 recording of Radio 4’s Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation when the comedian introduced his special guest. The sight of the great Ms Steadman just strolling from the wings generated the loudest applause of the evening.

She elicited a similar reaction inside the Aldwych Theatre when, for Mum’s birthday in 1993, we were in the stalls for The Rise and Fall of Little Voice matinee. Accustomed to her TV performances, I think we all gasped as she uttered her opening lines. Instead of in her normal sing-song voice, they emerged as if, in my words at the time, she “had swallowed a box of sandpaper”. She was brilliant. Incredibly, while the remarkable Jane Horrocks claimed the initial plaudits in the title role, it was Steadman as her awful mother Mari who won the prestigious Olivier Award.

By that time, she was a familiar face on screens small and large, largely through her association with her then hubby, playwright Mike Leigh. I first met her televisual acquaintance in 1976. I rarely watched BBC’s Play for Today strand, as it had a reputation for serious drama. Come 9.25pm I would prefer to grapple with a history essay or French grammar exercise than sit through an hour and a half of gritty social realism or middle-class porn (my contemporary diary entries suggested I was a terrible prude!). However, when Dad suggested I watch Nuts in May, I was blown away.

I never realised a Play For Today could be so hilarious, or for that matter, filmed on location. Depicting a mismatched couple’s attempts to enjoy a camping weekend in Dorset, it was a revelation to me. I became a lifelong fan of both Alison Steadman and Roger Sloman and snippets from their dialogue cropped up in family conversation for years to come. This won’t be my last reference to Nuts in May in this memoir…

Alison’s timid character Candice-Marie didn’t get the best lines but her monstrously pretentious Beverly (below) dominated the following year’s Abigail’s Party. An abridged version of Leigh’s stage work, this became surely one of the greatest of all TV plays, with its subtle shift from comedy to tragedy. Even today I cannot hear Demis Roussos or Donna Summer’s sensual ‘Love to Love You Baby’ without visualising Steadman’s attempts to sashay, glass in hand, across her living room. 

By no means have I watched her every television role. For example, I never saw Pride and Prejudice or Fat Friends. I’ve also yet to dip into her 2019 sitcom with John Cleese, Hold the Sunset. However, I was surprised when she cropped up in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, which I found tough to watch. It was also harrowing to see her in Care, playing Sheridan Smith’s widowed mother who suffers a stroke leading to dementia. It made you think, made you cry but could never make you laugh.

Yet comedy is her forte. I recall her in ITV’s Gone to the Dogs (with Jim Broadbent) and as the wife of James Bolam’s Missing Postman in a gentle two-part comedy-drama in the Nineties. All the while, I’d catch her in some of the funniest British films when they were screened on telly. She was never the star but lent quality support in Clockwise, A Private Function, Shirley Valentine and, of course, Mike Leigh’s brilliant Life is Sweet, portraying the long-suffering mum of difficult daughters Jane Horrocks and Claire Skinner.

I suppose her twenty-first century highlight has to be as the role of Pamela in Gavin & Stacey. Writers James Cordern and Ruth Jones understandably made their characters Smithy and Nessa the most dominant but it’s the top-class supporting team which made the comedy so successful. Indeed I saw an interview with Alison Steadman in which she singles out her time with her G&S ‘family’ as her favourite.

It took me a while to fully immerse myself in the lives of the Shipman and West families and their friends, but once word of the BBC3 series spread like wildfire, I was drawn in. For starters, like me, the Smiths hail from Billericay. How could I not engage? When Angie and I became an item, the Essex/Wales connection took on a new meaning and, on meeting new people, Angie always likens us to Gavin and Stacey. The likes of Julia Davis and Rob Brydon are also TV royalty but for me it’s Alison Steadman’s involvement which is the icing on the cake. She may be 73 but I honestly can’t remember seeing her in anything less than excellent. That’s rare.