Ma and Pa Larkin had lots of dosh. So does Mrs Boffin, her character in the award-winning Our Mutual Friend. Pam Ferris tells FRANCES GRANT that she dreams of the big win, too.
Daydreaming of instant riches is a seductive pastime. Who can resist fantasising about the big windfall?
Pam Ferris enjoys
it. Yes, she takes lottery tickets, the actor says during a phone interview from her home in London. "I have a sister in Australia and I ring her every Sunday and we do play that game of what we would do if we won."
There's a reason we're talking about lovely lolly. Money talks all the way through Charles Dickens' great, sprawling novel Our Mutual Friend.
And in the award-winning BBC adaptation, starting this week on Prime, Ferris plays a classic Dickens character - a lowly working woman who, with her husband, suddenly inherits an immense fortune.
The legacy which falls in the laps of Mr and Mrs Boffin is at the centre of the story. It binds together a cast of characters representing a cross-section of life in Victorian London - from the pillars of high society to those trapped in grinding poverty and squalor.
It also lies at the heart of the tale's two love stories - between the money-hungry Bella Wilfer and the mysterious John Rokesmith, and the unlikely couple of poor Lizzie Hexam and arrogant lawyer Eugene Wrayburn.
But it's the Boffins' sudden upward mobility which drives the plot. The simple, good-hearted Boffins decide to take key character Bella (Anna Friel) along on their drive to become people of fashion.
"I like to think of her as a pools winner or a lottery winner," says Ferris of her character. "Someone who's really been blasted into having a lot of money which she doesn't know how to spend very well. For example, she rather overeggs the pudding on the clothing front."
But while Mrs Boffin's attempts at sartorial splendour are a sight to behold, she's the one character whose delight in money remains purely superficial. Underneath the good woman never changes. "She's a sweetheart, she's not got a mean bone in her body, she's delightful."
She sounds just like the Ferris we like to think we know and love from such series as The Darling Buds Of May and Where The Heart Is.
"But have you seen the film Matilda, where I play the nastiest woman in the world?" she protests. "But yeah, what's good is that it seems to be an unshakeable belief in the British public that I am awfully nice. So I can be as nasty as I like but they don't seem to change their minds. They still think it's me. It's not, it's all lies."
That claim we like to make that Ferris is a Kiwi isn't exactly true, either. But Ferris isn't at all averse to it. She immigrated to New Zealand with her parents at age 13 and returned to England a decade later.
"So I had a very important 10 years there," she says of the country where she started her acting career, first in amateur dramatics in Christchurch and then at Auckland's former Mercury Theatre.
"And also thank you to the then Government who gave me a 750-quid bursary to come to Britain which is all I had in the world ... it sounds a lot but it blimmin' ran out ever so quick, I tell you."
Money and the city of London - it's a topic which brings us straight back to the social concerns of Victorian literary giant, Dickens.
"He wasn't a left-winger in the sense that that didn't exist then. But he certainly was protesting about the way things were and how cruelly people were treated by the system. He was a powerful force for change, he really was, because people loved his writing so much he got into their brains."
The relevance of Dickens' themes is made all the more evident by the very modern feel of this adaptation, says Ferris. For the record, Our Mutual Friend took four gongs at this years Bafta awards - including best drama serial.
As well as Mrs Boffin's costumes - which had such personality of their own that Ferris and designer Mike O'Neill gave them each names - another joy was playing opposite veteran actor Peter Vaughan (Mr Boffin).
"He's been a hero of mine for a long, long time, a fine television actor. We clicked so completely and that was great news for me. It meant ageing up a bit - but that's all right. I'm 50 but I'm trying to look more like 60 with him. And I have to say the costumes and make-up helped a great deal to look awful."
Ferris' real-life husband Roger Frost also has a small part in Our Mutual Friend, as the police inspector investigating the murder of the fortune's original heir.
The couple have no children, she says, but they do have three dogs. Two have just joined the family, saved from a pet rescue centre. "Two elderly dogs who nobody wanted. One of them's got a heart problem and they're falling to bits and smell a bit."
Sprung. She is indeed nice and kind-hearted. "Well, nice to dogs." The lottery dream bears this out. What would she do if she won a serious pile of money?
"This is the present fantasy. My sister and I are going to open a dogs' boarding kennel in Australia. This is pure fantasy, it'll never happen but it sounds like a really fun idea to me."
Who: Pam Ferris
What: Our Mutual Friend
Where: Prime
When: Thursday, 8.35 pm
Ma and Pa Larkin had lots of dosh. So does Mrs Boffin, her character in the award-winning Our Mutual Friend. Pam Ferris tells FRANCES GRANT that she dreams of the big win, too.
Daydreaming of instant riches is a seductive pastime. Who can resist fantasising about the big windfall?
Pam Ferris enjoys
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