TV: Love by the lakes not all dreams and daffodils

After her naked romps in a BBC drama, Emma Cunniffe tells FRANCES GRANT she would think carefully before doing it again.

England's picturesque Lake District has inspired many a Romantic work of poetry and prose, but it's not the usual setting for fiction in the genre of rough and raw realism.

"It's the sort of place you go when you're younger for a camping holiday or a day out with your mum and dad," says Emma Cunniffe, one of the leads in the earthy BBC drama The Lakes (9.05 pm, TV One).

Cunniffe, speaking from her home in London, says rediscovering the beauty of the area she had visited only a couple of times as a child was one of the highlights of her role in the serial as Catholic teenager Emma Quinlan.

The tranquil, picture-postcard scenery, she points out, also forms an ironic backdrop for the drama, which delves into the lives of characters in a small Lakeland village with a dark, unlovely soul.

Certainly some of the scenes Cunniffe was required to perform were not the kind you'd want mum and dad along for. The antics of many of the other characters could not be called family viewing either.

Her character, Emma, falls for the serial's anti-hero, Danny, a lad from the dole queues of Liverpool equipped with a silver tongue, glad eye and a gambling habit. Some frankly portrayed outdoors sex scenes later, Emma is pregnant and the pair embark on a marriage fraught with disaster.

Those scenes, which created a stir when the show played in Britain, were daunting to play out before the cameras, says 25-year-old Cunniffe. "But I'm glad I did it in a funny way because it's something you're going to be faced with at some stage ... I now know what I wouldn't do again and what I would."

What wouldn't she do again? "I don't know if I'd do complete nudity again unless it was really necessary for the part. But in the context of The Lakes I think it was because at the beginning they made it clear they wanted it to be as realistic and raw as possible. I mean, I was okay with it. What I'm saying is you have to justify it and I would think carefully about it next time."

Cunniffe was already familiar with the role of teenage mother, however. She's played a gym-slip mum several times before, including in an episode of Dangerfield and a sitcom called Life After Birth. "I think I must look the motherly type."

Another aspect which helped her get the role was her Catholic upbringing. "The issue of pregnancy - I haven't experienced that," she says. "But I could understand why she felt the way she did because I understand how the Catholic Church is."

The setting of The Lakes is a change in territory for the writer, Jimmy McGovern (creator of the hard-edged crime thriller Cracker and the movie Priest). His usual dramatic stamping ground is city mean streets and bleak suburbs.

But there is a connection, she says. "The very first part of it is semi-autobiographical because Jimmy himself worked in a hotel in the Lake District when he was younger. I think he met his wife there and she was from a good Catholic family."

"I don't think she got pregnant in the way Emma did and, of course, the drowning [of the young girls in last week's episode] is all fictional but the reason he set it there was because he had had experiences there."

The role in The Lakes was a career break, says Cunniffe, who trained in drama and dance first in her home town of Chester, in northern England, then for three years in London.

"It was a leading role in a big drama for the BBC. And he [McGovern] has got such a good reputation here. If you say you're doing a Jimmy McGovern drama, people go, `Oh, right.' You know, you're then taken seriously."

After The Lakes (a second series was filmed last year and will follow straight on from the first on television here), Cunniffe donned corset and hooped skirt to play country girl Biddy in a BBC adaptation of Dickens' novel Great Expectations.

Is gaining a part in a big, costume drama a prime ambition for the young English actor? "I think that, again, it's something you're taken seriously for. So it was a really good sort of natural progression after The Lakes to get something which was again high-profile.

"But I wouldn't say it was my aim to be in a period piece. My aim is to keep doing good work."

Next in the appointments diary is a made-for-television film set during the First World War, All The King's Men, starring David Jason. After that, says Cunniffe, she's hoping to do some theatre. Her dream is a substantial feature film role.

Meanwhile, she is curious to know what New Zealand viewers will make of The Lakes. While it caused a stir in Britain, the reaction was split into two camps.

"Some people didn't like it and turned it off, some people were pleased stuff like that is being made - not because they can watch people bonking but because it means that there is a cutting edge to drama and it isn't all pretty costume drama. You can have gritty realism - I think it was realistic in lots of ways, and people appreciated they were given something that was."

What: The Lakes

Where: TV One

When: 9.05 tonight (Wednesday, April 21)