The Independent (London, England); 25/1/2003; Sweet, Matthew

I love Lucy; To some she's Dawn from 'the Office'. To others she's Hayley in 'the Archers'. Over the past few years, Lucy Davis has quietly become a regular on our airwaves. Now, with a launch in the US, a project with Nigel Havers waiting in the wings.

It's an odd thing, discovering that you've had a relationship with someone without really knowing it. For the best part of a decade, however, millions of us have been admiring a young actress from Solihull without ever being polite enough to ask her name. But as Hayley in The Archers, we blubbed for her when her lover was juiced like a guava under the monstrous chassis of a Massey Ferguson tractor, and rejoiced when she found happiness with the strapping son of a depressive farmhand.
As Dawn in The Office, we recognised that Madame Bovary had been reborn in contemporary Slough, and empathised as she struggled to choose between a holiday in Florida with her loutish boyfriend, or something more complicated with the salesman at whom she had been staring, googly eyed, for two series. And we might even have been aware of her in a third context - as the subject of dramatic newspaper headlines such as "Jasper Carrott's wife donates kidney to save daughter" - without ever realising that this trinity of figures were comprised of only one. She is Lucy Davis, very nearly (but not quite) 30, just off to Los Angeles to launch The Office on BBC America, and wondering whether she'll be greeted with a mistral of laughter or a rank of blank faces.
"I think they'll get it. I hope they'll get it. Touch wood," she says, tapping her forehead for want of any mahogany. "To be honest, when we started I had no idea how it would go down in this country, either. But the Americans invented Larry Sanders and I could imagine Gary Shandling playing David Brent if they re-cast it over there."
Davis meets me at her agent's offices (a jungle of rubber plants overlooking Charing Cross Road), breezing in with a paper bag stuffed with chocolate chip muffins, and plonking herself down on the sofa. Although she's clearly a real person - what fictional character ever brought you a cake? - it's hard not to keep asking questions about Hayley and Dawn, as if they were real figures for whom Davis was an official spokesperson. Will Dawn ever escape the drudgery of reception work at Wernham Hogg, and pursue her dream to illustrate children's books? Did she turn down Tim's proposal because she was afraid that he might come to feel that she was not his intellectual equal - or because she's more in love with her boyfriend Lee than we'd been led to believe? Does Hayley still worry about the neo- Nazi activities of her husband Roy (who once sent racist hate-mail to Usha Gupta) or is she confident that a business studies course at Felpersham University has saved him from recidivism? Isn't there a corner of Hayley's mind still chilled by the anxiety that Kate Aldridge, her adopted daughter's biological mother, will come storming over from South Africa to steal her family away? Shouldn't Roy and Hayley have a baby of their own, to cement that relationship entirely? Or is she still concerned that he might be a secret transvestite? Why did Freda Fry remain silent even when she won the Bull's hotly contested simnel cake competition?
Though she entreats me not to introduce ideas about Hayley's reproductive activities into the minds of the producers of The Archers - after all, any baby in Ambridge might turn out to be Brian Aldridge's - she seems quite happy talking about the private lives of these non-existent, but curiously convincing people. Much happier, I think, than she is about discussing her own. So she puts these two characters on the couch. Hayley's unerring virtue, it seems, sometimes frustrates her: "Hayley's so saintly that she'd probably pick other people's children up off the streets and look after them as her own," she says, a little wearily. As for Dawn, well, here's a minute sifting through the mind of Slough's most despondent phone-jockey. "When we first started we wondered whether Lee hit her, but Ricky Gervais wasn't keen on anything so black and white. Nothing's ever rocked Dawn's boat at all. Her parents were never divorced, she didn't have a traumatic childhood, she's never had to worry too much about money. Nobody's ever forced her to do anything. She never did any A-levels. She's born and bred in Slough, though for some reason she's never picked up the accent - another failing of mine."
And why did Dawn refuse to dump Lee and run off with Tim? "If Tim had propositioned her before she organised the trip to Florida, then she'd have gone with him," she reasons. "At first I couldn't understand why she was saying no to him. I'd spent the entire series flirting with him outrageously and staring over at him, touching him at every possible opportunity. What was it all about? She's not a prick tease. I don't think she's playing games with him and trying to mess with his mind. She genuinely loves him."
She breaks off in mid-flight. "Am I boring you?" she asks. I assure her that these questions have been discussed around the nation's water-coolers for weeks, and that she is the best source for a definitive interpretation. "Are you sure? You can stick your hand up if you're bored and we can move on." I'm all ears, so she continues. "It's because she organised this trip, it cost a lot of money and they'd arranged it with Lee's sister. And it's a really big thing to break up with your boyfriend and unorganise all of these plans. You've always got these kinds of feelings, especially when you've been in a long relationship. You might have fantasies, but no intention of acting upon them. She would never be unfaithful to Lee. And going off into the sunset with Tim would have been far too Hollywood."
Some facts about Lucy Davis, to redress the balance between real life and fiction. She was born in Solihull almost exactly 30 years ago, and has not abandoned the accent entirely. She has lived in Barnes, west London, with her boyfriend, Richard, for the past 11 years. She'd like to have children of her own, even if she's keen to deny that privilege to some of the characters she plays. She has one brother (an actor), and two sisters (who have both pursued utterly untheatrical professions). She is diabetic, but is not insulin-dependent. One of her kidneys was a gift from her mother, Hazel, who became her daughter's donor in a life-saving operation in December 1997. Her father, Robert Davis, better known to the world as Jasper Carrott OBE, is one of the country's most enduring stand-up acts, and also - thanks to his smart decision in the Eighties to leave the BBC for Celador, the independent production company that makes Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? - one of the richest.
"My dad is quite shy," she reflects. "He's never wanted or courted publicity. When we were kids he never brought us into the public eye at all." She was equally diffident about her relationship with him. "At school it always seemed important not to let people know, because you'd get teased, and at drama school even more so." Perhaps she's sometimes too reticent about her family connections: the producer of The Office, Ash Atalla, once asked her why she'd gone to the trouble of changing her name from Carrott to Davis - though she put him right on his mistake. "I think I've inherited some of my dad's shyness," she reflects. "I can't get used to being recognised in public - particularly on days when I'm looking shit."
After sixth-form college Davis attended the Italia Conti stage school, where, she says, through no fault of her teachers, she had a miserable time. "Unless you were in a glittery hat and a pair of tap shoes, the owners of the college really didn't want to know." So she left a year early, and persuaded her parents to pay her to be unemployed for a year while she looked for work and attended acting workshops. The result was a nice part in the BBC's bare-chested version of Pride and Prejudice, as the feather-headed Maria Lucas, and an invitation to become Hayley Jordan, the only denizen of Ambridge who doesn't know one end of a cow from the other. In a swingeing irony, she was originally considered for the part of Kate Aldridge. "They auditioned me down the phone," she recalls. "They just asked me to read anything, but all I could find was a packet of seeds." She declaimed the sowing instructions, and failed to get the part. A few weeks later, however, she was offered a one-episode gig on the soap as "John Archer's girlfriend, with one speech in a comedy Brummie accent." She has been part of the regular cast ever since.
Due to the way in which The Archers is recorded - a month's episodes are taped in a week, and not everybody in the company is always required - it took her two years to meet all of her fellow cast members. This doesn't surprise me - Jack Woolley, for instance, seems to have been doing the washing up or running errands to Penny Hassett for the last six months. But I am surprised when she tells me about the terms of an Archers' actor's employment. Like disreputable gangmasters that even Matt Crawford would think twice about contracting, the cast of The Archers does piecework; none of its members are on a retainer. "You get paid by the episode, and people can get quite hung up about how many they've been in. But you have to leave that behind you and not let it rule your life." So, if the storyliners decide that they don't want to bother with a character for a few months, the actor has to sit it out for a better season.
Still, the fringe benefits of being in the soap can be rewarding: fan conventions at Butlins holiday camps where Archers addicts can hang out with their cast; glitzy bashes at which high-profile listeners offer paeans to the programme. (Davis was the lucky actor selected to have her photograph taken with Camilla Parker Bowles - possibly because it would have been undiplomatic to snap the royal mistress on the arm of Brian Aldridge's squeeze Siobhan Hathaway.) "And when we had our 50th anniversary," enthuses Davis, "we had a massive convention at the National Indoor Arena. There were shows at which you could learn to make Jill's recipes and sound effects demonstrations where they showed how we give birth to a lamb with rubber gloves and yoghurt." As for the fans, "there are some that you really get to know and look forward to seeing at each convention. Others can react to you differently. People often tell me off for not being a brunette. And there was one guy who came up to me and whispered something in my ear." (Here she adopts rasping, shivery tones, like an unpleasantly pre- orgasmic Gollum.) "`Oooooh. I think you're lovely. If I ever have children I'd like you to babysit.'"
The Office has also generated a complicated relationship between characters, actors and public. Davis has received many melancholy letters from real- life Dawns, young women slowly dying of boredom under the strip lights of industrial estates, to whose misery the sit-com has held a mirror. (Less explicably, she was also recently sent a photograph of herself in the form of a paper aeroplane.) Being rather ambitious herself, Davis finds it hard not to feel impatient with Dawn's lassitude, but suspects that there's only her recent acting success between her and a photocopier in Berkshire. "Christ knows what I'd do if I didn't act. I'd probably have to take some menial office job ..."
Just at the moment, that doesn't seem to be necessary. When the producers of Celebrity Big Brother attempted to woo her into their fishbowl, she declined. ("I did want to work again," she says.) At the end of the month, she'll play the romantic lead in The Real Arnie Griffin, a comedy thriller set in Birmingham, to be screened as part of a new daytime drama strand on BBC1. (The Corporation put her up in a hotel in which the dirty bathwater of the person next door customarily surged up through her plughole, but the shoot - directed by Nigel Havers - was, she asserts, a useful experience.) She also has a small part as the maid to Mr and Mrs Squeers in the new film of Nicholas Nickleby, but she doesn't want to talk that up. ("Years ago I did three scenes in a film called The Gambler and went around telling everyone I was about to star in a film with Michael Gambon. They cut most of my stuff out, which was really embarrassing.") If the Americans can see the funny side of The Office, she may never have to suffer such indignity again. If they don't get it - if they find, for example, that Dawn's refusal of Tim is not Hollywood enough - then it's not the end of the world for Lucy Davis. And California's loss will be Borchester's gain.
The Real Arnie Griffin, Wednesday, BBC1 at 2.30pm.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Independent Newspapers (UK) Ltd.

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