Byrning up the sitcoms

By FIONA RAE

You remember Ed Byrne — he was the Irish comedian who, a couple of years back, was travelling the world apologising for Riverdance. He also had a nice line about Alanis Morissette's Ironic ("It's not a metaphor, it's a simile.")

But what's a lanky, chain-smoking comedian to do after he's sold out London, Toronto and Auckland? Television, of course. He was in an ITV Christmas panto as Aladdin, did a film with Pete Postlethwaite and can be seen here on TV3 this week in the sitcom Sam's Game. He's also writing his own sitcom, commissioned by Carlton Television in Britain, called The Union.

Byrne plays neurotic Alex, flatmate to ladette Sam, who is having not just one of those days, but one of those lives. Also in the line-up are Tristan Gemmel as the charmer across the hall, and Tamka Empson as the girl upstairs who works in the local cafe.

Meanwhile, co-star Davina McCall, who plays the Sam of the title, is also making her big move into acting. McCall became the most-recognised woman in Britain when she presented the UK's Big Brother. The lock'em up show was huge for Channel 4, giving it the best ratings since its 1996 showing of Four Weddings and a Funeral.

"I knew it was really, really popular when my granny told me she watched it, and was addicted," McCall told Hello! magazine. "When your granny is interested, you know you're on to a winner."

McCall's previous presenting jobs include Streetwise, where she grabbed unsuspecting members of the public off the street and made them go on dates with complete strangers, and her own show on MTV.

It's been a rocky road to success for McCall, however, whose fractured childhood led to wild teenage years where she developed anorexia and subsequently became a fixture on the club scene.

"I was a drug addict, a complete mess," she says of her early-20s. "You name it, I took it. Cocaine, ecstasy, even heroin, although I never injected. I had a job so I looked like I was holding everything together."

Family friend Eric Clapton helped bring her around and led to her landing the job with MTV.

She was petrified about taking on an acting role in the Friends-style sitcom and the first day on set was one of the scariest of her life.

"I never really considered acting as a career. During school plays I was always the tragic one at the back of the class who got to play a tree or the wind."

She feared that as a TV-presenter-turned-actress she may receive some flak from the critics.

"I'm venturing into something I haven't trained for and people are naturally and understandably going to ask what gives me the right to become an actress.

"It's up to them to judge whether I am good or not, but I wouldn't have accepted the series if I hadn't been able to watch the pilot and at the end of the day say 'That's okay', and I wasn't hiding behind the sofa with a cushion over my eyes."

After an unsuccessful marriage to actor Andrew Leggett in 1997, she met her current husband, TV presenter and model Matthew Robertson, while walking her dog in a west London park.

They are now the proud parents of little Holly Willow and McCall has also fronted an agony aunt show called Davina's Closure, where viewers and celebrities get something off their chest and thereby achieve "closure".

* Sam's Game, TV3, Thursdays, 9:30pm