Kathy Burke

Kathy Burke interview: 'Work non-stop? That's not me'

It's been 10 years since Kathy Burke stuck two fingers up at stardom. Here she talks about loving theatre, hating writing - and why Richard Dawkins gives her the hump.

The school-based sitcom playground is getting pretty crowded, with the bell just rung on Big School and Jack Whitehall's Bad Education still running around dropping its shorts at anyone who's interested. But for my money the pick of the Class of 2013 is Some Girls (BBC3), which scores one vital A* over the opposition: it looks as though it's set in a school that might actually exist.

On the face of it, the group of south London bffs at the heart of Some Girls is painfully PC: one sorted black girl, one ditzy white blonde, one brainy Asian and one baby Kathy Burke. So it's full credit to the spark in the writing of Bernadette Davies and a set of confident performances from the four leads that this formula adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It works.

Led from the front by Adelayo Adedayo as Viva, who was facing down the tricky issue of dumping a fit boyfriend who was too thick for her, last night's episode centred on the sudden death of a science teacher - cue the arrival of Broadchurch's Jonathan Bailey as unashamed lust object - and the fallout therein.

It was all dealt with delightfully distastefully, as voiced by the straight-talking Aussie gym teacher/resident hard-faced bitch: 'We'll provide a counsellor - if you can't talk it over with your mates like a normal person.'

There's a lot that's very, very good about The Mimic, which stars the gifted impressionist Terry Mynott as lowly maintenance man Martin Hurdle.

It's the second episode tonight, but if you missed the first all you need to know is that Martin escapes his humdrum life by doing other people's voices - everyone from Alan Carr to Christopher Walken - and last week he discovered he has an 18-year-old son called Steven. Probably. We're still waiting for the results of the DNA test.

As a means of doing something more interesting with impressions than just going down the Dead Ringers route (or Very Important People, which was Mynott's last gig) this gets full marks for originality.

And the excellent supporting cast includes Ami Metcalf (last seen playing the young Kathy Burke in Walking And Talking) who plays colleague Chelsea, and Neil Maskell (fresh from playing Utopia's hit man) as a depressed newsagent whose foray into internet dating tonight is inspired.

But the mixture of occasionally crude humour and misty-eyed pathos is a tough one to pull off successfully. And that soundtrack is one dollop of syrup too far.

After the success of Chris O'Dowd's Moone Boy and Kathy Burke's Walking And Talking it was hard not to expect big things from Sky1's latest lot of Little Crackers.

But I can't see any of this year's first batch making it to a full series. Joanna Lumley's much-hyped look back at her early modelling days was particularly uninspiring. But with efforts from the likes of Paul O'Grady, Sharon Horgan and Jason Manford still to come this week perhaps we shouldn't give up all hope just yet.

Sky's star-filled success story of recent years has been this yuletide anthology, a sprinkling of cheer across the festive schedules. Two of the autobiographical shorts have even sired fantastic series - Kathy Burke's Walking and Talking and Chris O'Dowd's Moone Boy.

The third series opens by whisking us back to the swinging and sexist Sixties. Baby, Be Blonde sees the young Joanna Lumley (played with wide-eyed charm by newcomer Ottilie Mackintosh) contending with haircuts and wig-fittings before her jittery first assignment.

Daniel Ings is uproariously awful as a photographer who marshals his models like animals ("Put the hippo at the back"). And Lumley, making her directorial debut as well as a cameo as a dragonish fashionista, reveals the facts behind the fun in a 15-minute look behind the scenes. The next Little Cracker, featuring Rebecca Front, is on Sky1 tomorrow.

Series 26, episode one: team captains Noel Fielding and Phill Jupitus are back in their chairs for more rude pop-based quizzing. In the presenter's seat - still without a regular occupant since the peerless Simon Amstell resigned - is Kathy Burke. Her excellent comedy Walking and Talking showed she knows and loves her pop music, at least if it was released in 1979. Among the guests are Fazer from N-Dubz and surprise Olympic long jump champion Greg Rutherford.

The pigeon-holers have really had their work cut out for them with Chris O'Dowd's acting career.

Its varied highlights so far have included roles as Roy in The IT Crowd, a frustrated Victorian writer in The Crimson Petal And The White[/u] and, most recently, Hollywood heart-throb status in ­[i]Bridesmaids.

Now he's going back to his home town of Boyle, County Roscommon, to play the ­imaginary friend of 12-year-old Martin Moone (David Rawle). Co-written by O'Dowd, if Moone Boy's nostalgic ­innocence reminds you of anything, it's likely to be Kathy Burke's Walking And Talking which also started life as one of Sky's Little Crackers series a couple of Christmases ago.

Launched with a two-parter, episode one is utterly stolen by Simon Delaney, who plays the father of two very nasty school bullies, while episode two follows Martin's mum's campaign to get Mary Robinson elected as Ireland's first female president.

But it also features an ­unforgettably skin-crawling cameo from Steve Coogan as fishmonger ­"Touchy" Feeley.

And we love the show's theme tune from Irish punk band, The Sultans Of Ping FC.

As befits his imaginary friend status, O'Dowd takes a bit of a back seat in terms of screen time, but it seems he's got another hit on his hands.

Kathy Burke's Walking And Talking, Sky Atlantic, review

Kathy Burke's drama about her teenage years in 1970s London very funny and oddly uplifting, writes Martin Chilton.

An offering from Sky Atlantic which is tempting Sky1 viewers is this new sitcom starring and co-written by Kathy Burke.

Set in 1979, Walking and Talking is an autobiographic sitcom in which Kath, played by Ami Metcalf, walks from school with her best friend Mary (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) and talk about their worries and everyday goings on.

Personally speaking, I found the actual walking and talking to be the least appealing bit. In fact I found it mostly dull and uninteresting, but maybe that's because I wasn't around in 1979 to experience what 'life was like back then.'

However things started to get interesting when the senior performers come to the forefront. These segments include conversations between two nuns that work at the school, played by Burke herself and Sean Gallagher in drag, and the worrying encounters the two girls have with local nutter Jimmy the Jew (Jerry Sadowitz).

It was a strange role for Sadowitz, but he was absolutely amazing. You don't tend to see him act that often, which he clearly can do by what I've seen. But the profanities were absent here too, which is certainly odd to those who've seen his stand-up. But despite this, he is still as intimidating and menacing. He plays the character perfectly.

Walking and Talking isn't perfect, but it certainly has its moments. No doubt it can be tightened up in various ways to iron out some of the minor issues...

Kathy Burke the writer, source and inspiration for Walking and Talking, corsets herself selflessly into a small yet lovely cameo as, basically, "angry smoking fecking Irish nun", who manages, while discussing Top of the Pops in a concrete Islington playground in 1979, overseeing children she hates, to reduce a fellow nun to hot salt tears over, of all things, the Teutonic origins of Boney M. Wonderful.

Mainly, however, Burke lets the phenomenal young Ami Metcalf recreate Burke's own adolescence with (from both talents) honesty and pluck and wit, verisimilitude and yearning. It's shot in a lovely leached-bone white, which wasn't all of 1979 but well, OK, most of it. Young Kathy (likes Keith Waterhouse, Play for Today, Porridge; hates wasps, Thatcher, dad when drunk, nuns) and her friend Helen debate fatness, chat-up lines and down-there stuff in a way which would now have them cautioned or sectioned or weeping on morning TV, and is as wizardly refreshing as the wind blowing through your armpit hair on holiday. The most uplifting thing yet this year, and young Kathy hasn't even got her trainer bra.