Smash hit

A crucial element in her dramatic armoury was denied her, she says: “All that coincided with the time I had a great body. Nudity is not something I’ve ever had the tiniest problem with in the past. But now I have to think in a way that ensures I’ll never embarrass my kids.”

Consequently, Graham is with the repertory company that the BBC retains for its burgeoning forays, post-Doctor Who, into the genres of fantasy and science fiction. “Nowadays they pay me to keep my clothes on,” she says.

When faced with crypto-archeological mystery, as in Bonekickers, or the dystopian crisis that’s being depicted currently in the remake of the 1970s cult show Survivors, what’s called for, it appears, is a stroppy, imposing Amazon such as Graham, especially if she talks, as the actress does, in the flat, no-nonsense tones of an Ayrshire native receiving an inconvenient call from a telemarketer. As we speak, Graham — and the BBC — seem to be getting away, though only just, with Survivors, a feat that both failed conspicuously to achieve with Bonekickers, an Indiana Jones/Da Vinci Code mash-up by the writer of Life On Mars that united critics in a sacred brotherhood of loathing. “What arrived on screen bore little resemblance to the scripts I read,” she says. “But at least it wasn’t yet another hospital drama.”

Survivors plays on Graham’s new aura of mumsy purposiveness as she plays Abby Grant, the mother of a boy who goes missing, just as a mysterious virus is annihilating humankind, or at least the part of it that lives in the home counties.

Graham must assemble those who have escaped infection and rally them towards a new kind of post-apocalyptic life, though in a weirdly picturesque world in which the corpses littering the streets never seem to decompose and everyone speaks in relentless expository dialogue — “Can’t you see how wrong this is?”

In the original, made in the 1970s, this new life involved a return to the ancient ways of agronomy and tool-making. No doubt this modern lot will end up establishing an eco-village and a macrobiotic cafeteria, such is the show’s shiny modernist gloss.

If nothing else, Survivors keeps Graham within the BBC, underlining her role as a kind of domestic Sigourney Weaver, a feisty and capable warrior-mother.

It’s to Graham’s advantage that she has never quite become indivisible from any particular role. The closest she came was playing Megan Hartnoll, the lesbian dream-girl in the hugely-popular At Home with the Braithwaites. She’s as promiscuous with her characters as her characters once were with semi-naked handymen named Bob.

Graham is a seemingly constant presence on our screens, the designated bolshie woman-over-40 who isn’t Helen Mirren. As well as Survivors and Bonekickers, since 2006 she’s been seen in Mobile, The History of Mr Polly, Afterlife, The Kindness of Strangers, Marple and Rebus.

Her agent must be expecting a call from Daniela Nardini any day now. “Really? Am I that ubiquitous? I always thought I spaced it quite well, actually. I’m certainly not that famous an actor and I’m not that popular an actor. I’d hate to think people are sitting at home saying, Oh God, it’s her again.”

Again, devoted motherhood has played its part, Graham says.

Cinema involves horribly long days, theatre involves extended tours. With television, she can usually get back by bath time.

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