For TV junkies whose only previous experience of Doon Mackichan is as a sassy comedian or the plucky Celebrity Fame Academy contestant, it’s a surprise to see her turn serious and start analysing modern relationships. But that is how she will emerge this week when a new Spanish comedy called Excuses! makes it debut in Edinburgh.
“It mines a seam of women expecting more and men feeling emasculated,” says the actress thoughtfully. “It’s very honest and near the knuckle.”
Yet others who have followed her career will not be surprised by Mackichan’s interest in the ever-shifting line between men and women. In her very first television appearance, back in the 1980s, she caused a stir simply by refusing to shave her legs. Cast as Cinderella in Hale and Pace’s Christmas Show, she wore a short skirt. That was fine, but Mackichan wasn’t going to sell out the sisterhood and take a razor to her legs so early in her career. Instead she endured the crew singing “Gillette, the best a man can get” every time she walked by.
Such fortitude in adversity. Yet these same principles put her in good stead a decade later. She became pregnant with her second child during rehearsals for Brecht’s Mother Courage at the National Theatre. “They sacked me and I took them on and won,” she explains. “It was sad that it had to come to that. But I got the part back.”
In that production, the actress was playing a prostitute and, as it turned out, her pregnancy added to the character’s pathos.
“I did it until I was seven months pregnant. People thought it was a creative decision,” she recalls. “You should be working as much as possible, because when the baby comes you’re going to have at least six months at home.”
Mackichan, in other words, plays by her own rules. It’s a quality that accounts for the distinctiveness of Smack the Pony. The Emmy award-winning series stood out not simply because of the number of women on screen, but because they had a texture that was all their own. Without show or fanfare, Mackichan, and co-stars Sally Phillips and Fiona Allen minted a uniquely female form of comedy that broke the mould.
“We’d get sketches that had been written for guys — they rubbed out the blokes’ names and said these can be for two women,” she says, her accent betraying none of the formative teenage years she spent in Upper Largo in Fife.
“We spent years breaking that down and saying, actually, women are just as stupid as men, they might talk about sex or about inconsequential rubbish, but with a slightly different rhythm to it.
“The ground rules were not to deal with issues of weight, hormones or food. We said, ‘Let’s make it funny without it being your time of the month or desperately wanting to eat a cake. Let’s be more clowny, more physical and find other ways of expressing what our experience is’.”
They’ve called it a day on Smack the Pony, although the three women will appear in a film comedy called Gladiatress next year. Mackichan, meanwhile, has carried her experiences with her to ATC’s Excuses! which, having been roughly translated from Joel Joan and Jordi Sanchez’s Spanish original, needed its language sharpening up. “I rewrote a lot, particularly the women relating to each other, because it didn’t feel real, she says. “It was very bitchy, catty and arch and I think men often write for women like that.”
Despite the forcefulness of her opinions, Mackichan is relaxed, and friendly in person. She says she is “driven”, but close up she’s neither starry nor egotistical. She is very much the ordinary mother of two, not a showbiz star. We meet in central London in the Waldorf hotel, the publicist’s choice, but Mackichan is not a Waldorf sort of person and takes delight in mocking the self-consciously trendy furniture in the reception and the faux antiques of the bar.
She appears to have recovered from the trauma of doing Celebrity Fame Academy in March, though it was a shock to the system. “It was hysterical and awful,” she says. “My mum watched it the other night. She’d forgotten how stressful it was and said I looked absolutely terrified and exhausted. It was because of being filmed all the time: the loud singing, the not sleeping, the not eating, and you keep thinking you’re going home, then you don’t. I was away for six nights and I began to feel myself getting very emotional. I didn’t want to cry because I knew they wanted me to.
“When I came out it was mad. Your street cred goes up from 3m people who watched Smack the Pony to 15m. I couldn’t get the Tube; people keep staring at you.”
It’s all a long way from her teenage years. Her family moved to Scotland from Surrey when she was 10 and stayed until she’d done her highers. They lived in a “big scary house” on the beach, her mother working the land and her father getting a job in a textile mill. “I dream about that house probably once a month,” she says.
“I’m plagued by the beauty of it and how much I wish I could be up there more. I went to the Edinburgh Festival every year for about 10 years on the trot and I would always go back to Upper Largo. I’d hang around my old house. It’s painful. I haven’t taken my kids up there yet and my husband hasn’t seen Largo Bay and the chain walk to Elie and Pittenweem, Crail and St Andrews — all the places where we grew up. I’d like to give my kids a bit of that unbelievable beauty of nature.”
As well as the romance, the place was a crucial influence on her skills as a comic. She traces her love of the deadpan gag to having been an outsider in a small community and having to find a way of fitting in. She discovered she could avoid being bullied by making people laugh. And smoking.
“Being in Scotland when you’re an English girl, learning about humour up there was very formative for me. You’re aged 11 and terrified of the school: 1,000 kids and you’re the only one with an English accent.
“The first few months were quite miserable, sitting on a bus by myself and nobody talking to me. Finally one of the main ring leaders got on and offered me a cigarette — thus beginning my life of smoking.
“I had my stigmata,” she adds, demonstrating how she would cup her cigarette into her hand to conceal it. “We were proud to show off our nicotine stains in the palms of our hands.”
Living in Fife hardened her up in other ways too. Swimming in the North Sea in Largo Bay instilled in her a love of the water — whatever the climate. She says she turns into a monster if she can’t go swimming every day. In 1998, she was part of a relay team that swam the English Channel. She’s writing a film script on that theme.
“It’s about three women alcoholics who meet at rehab and end up swimming the Channel,” she says. “It’s been accepted as telly, but there’s enough for a film. It’s like Moby Dick, it’s people going mad in the ocean because they can’t cope with the intensity. If there are any rich entrepreneurs out there, please send money.”
Excuses! is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, November 20-22. Box office: 0131 228 1404.
