In a rambling pub in north London’s Haverstock Hill area, a gaggle of gnarled codgers — who, one suspects, were leaning on the door at opening time — are in residence. They are a direct counterpoint to the bright young thing who, with scrupulous punctuality, breezes in, all flaxen mane, doe eyes and more white teeth than a shelf of Zadie Smith. Things get even better. “I love Culture,” proclaims Billie Piper. “Ohmigod, I love it. I read it every Sunday.”
The pub, she apologises, is usually buzzing (it’s her local), “especially at Christmas”. Yuletide seems to be exercising her, an incongruous thing given such a glorious afternoon. Yet, fresh from night shoots on the festive edition of Doctor Who (snow on the Tardis, peace for alienkind and love in both of the Doctor’s Gallifreyan hearts), Piper can be forgiven for time-travelling again. “Can you imagine if it goes out on Christmas Day?” she enthuses. “I remember watching Only Fools and Horses at Christmas. I just couldn’t wait for it to come on. It’s really exciting.”
So sunny, so exceptionally delightful. It seems hard to believe that, not 12 months ago, Piper was in the showbiz doldrums, her teen-popstrel image still eclipsed by the vision of the “child bride” (tabloid inverted commas) trundling shopping trolleys of booze with Chris Evans. A year is a long time in showbiz, however, and Piper has packed an awful lot into her tender age (she’s 23). “It’s hard to get your head round the size of Doctor Who and the impression it has made,” she says, drama-school tones softened by the burr of her native Wiltshire. So unnerving was the launch, she went into hiding. “It scared the hell out of me, if I’m honest. But then, when the first one was out and it was just part of Saturday-night viewing, it felt a bit more real.”
As Rose Tyler, street-smart companion to the titular Time Lord (aged 953), Piper has been integral to the show’s success: it reached 10m viewers at its peak, almost half the audience share. There was talk that she might jump Tardis along with Christopher Eccleston (the Christmas edition marks the full debut of the new Doctor, David Tennant). But no, it was just tittle-tattle. “I was uncertain how many I was doing, because you have to wait for them all to be written. Now I’m signed up for the duration of the second series.”
Wisely, the BBC has snapped on the golden handcuffs. “They’re being so good to me,” she says. Thus, she can shortly be seen in Much Ado About Nothing, the first in a contemporised Shakespeare season. She plays Hero the weather girl (“Hints of Ulrika in her heyday”) to the bickering newsreaders Benedick (Damian Lewis) and Beatrice (Sarah Parish). It’s in a similar vein to the corporation’s jazzed-up Chaucer of a couple of years ago. It was there, in The Miller’s Tale (married to Dennis Waterman, aged 112), that Piper gave most of us our first chance to see her act. The portfolio has been expanding: the drama Bella and the Boys; the film The Calcium Kid, with Orlando Bloom; and, recently, a horror flick, Spirit Trap. “It’s had some terrible reviews,” she says. I was going to say lukewarm. She laughs.
Repairing to the beer garden, Piper dumps her things on the table: a “just-died-on-me” mobile, a packet of Marlboro Lights, her purse. A purple wristband dangles: “Anti-homophobia”. For all her beauty — unconventional or not, she really is quite the stunner — there is also something endearingly gauche about her: the freshly applied make-up, but the roots-need-doing dishevelment of the barnet; the smart black-and-white layered cardie and T-shirt look, but the burn hole in the sleeve.
The coltish grace masks a determination. Growing up in Swindon, where her dad was a builder (“He still is”) and her mum a housewife (the family, including three siblings, has since decamped to Spain), Piper was only 12 when she declared that she wanted to be an actress. “I was brutally ambitious as a kid — desperate to be a grown-up, desperate to leave Swindon.” Winning a scholarship to the Sylvia Young Theatre School, in London, she set about her rise alongside Amy Winehouse and Lee Ryan from Blue. Things were proceeding — a bit part in a Jon Bon Jovi film (“I stood about three miles away from him”) and a walk-on in Evita (“I’ve never seen it, but there’s a dinner-party scene: you get one big close-up of my face. It’s about a second”).
Then, suddenly, when she was 13, life took a 180-degree turn. In what seems another Lolita-ish vignette from the life of our nation’s sweetheart, Piper was spotted in a Smash Hits! ad by the producer Hugh Goldsmith and given a recording contract with Innocent, an offshoot of Virgin. She had never sung a note. But three No 1s, including the global hit Because We Want To, and a million-selling debut album rendered such details moot. Piper was the pre-Britney pop sensation. “I know, it’s mad, isn’t it?” she exclaims. “Then I had a single that went in at No 24, and I thought my world was over. And, of course, it’s not.”
She recalls playing a 100,000-strong gig in the States, before star guest President Clinton. “I was more interested in Jennifer Lopez (who shared the bill),” she remembers. As a manufactured act, she claims, she was at the mercy of a ruthless schedule, never able to savour her moments. There were stories of cathartic and excessive partying. “I started to go a bit mad,” she confesses. “I just wanted to wake up and do something I loved every day.” Millions of people would have killed to be in her shoes, she knows. “But I suddenly didn’t like it any more. I’m glad I decided to stop when I did.” Funnily enough, on the back of her television resurgence, a greatest-hits album has been released. “Apparently, it’s in the shops now,” she says. “I haven’t seen it.” She’ll not go down that road again, however.
It was before this demise that Chris Evans popped into the picture (some blamed his meddling for expediting it). The pair had met on his TFI Friday television programme — she was 18, he was 34 — at the point when the tabloids had started to turn. “He just reminded me that all of that stuff is complete bullshit, and that it’s not those things that are important in life,” she says. “I didn’t really give a f*** about what anybody said, because, finally, I was doing something for myself and it made me happy.”
That something was a two-year sabbatical — “The big old trip,” she calls it — as she and Evans, whose own career began unravelling spectacularly, travelled the world, taking in a quickie Vegas marriage along the way. There were quieter moments. She describes, most fondly, time at their Surrey cottage, waiting for Evans’s mansion to be renovated — “Just being at home and reading books and learning about who you are, because, at that age, you don’t know who you are.” It was serious stuff. “We just absolutely loved each other,” she goes on, “and found soul mates in one another. I found somebody who would let me breathe, and we just explored those sides of each other that we wouldn’t have done had I stayed singing and had he stayed on the radio. It was a real turning point for both of us.”
The red-tops had a field day. “I would leave the house looking like absolute shit, and I didn’t care,” Piper says. “And that was really liberating.” There were further allegations of hard drinking (she studiously cradles her pint of tap water). “Of course we went out and got completely lashed, and we had a great time — who doesn’t?” she protests. “But all of that other shit that focuses people? The age difference? We never even spoke about it.”
The marriage didn’t go the distance; the divorce is pending. “It all ended amicably. That’s not to say it wasn’t sad, because obviously, you go into a relationship hoping it will be for ever.” But they are, she insists, “still the best of mates”. She points one way, then the other. “He lives over there, and I live there.”
