For an actress of such diminutive stature, Jane Horrocks loves to go over the top. “Ab Fab, that was larger than life, but it still resonated with people,” she says of the glorious 1990s Jennifer Saunders sitcom in which Horrocks indelibly starred as the daffy assistant Bubble, dressed invariably like something off a Christmas tree.
For an actress of such diminutive stature, Jane Horrocks loves to go over the top. “Ab Fab, that was larger than life, but it still resonated with people,” she says of the glorious 1990s Jennifer Saunders sitcom in which Horrocks indelibly starred as the daffy assistant Bubble, dressed invariably like something off a Christmas tree.
“But you don’t get that sort of comedy any more. You don’t get those big character sketch shows like The Catherine Tate Show, or The Fast Show. That sort of comedy is these days considered a bit coarse. The tradition now is to underplay everything. It’s all about the cool irony.”
Cool irony is not a style readily associated with Horrocks. She’s all about the caricature, those “big, fleshed out characters you can gorge on,” as she puts it. This Christmas she can be seen giving it her all in two such outsized examples – as the voice of the guileless Babs in the sequel to Aardman’s 2000 animated hit Chicken Run, and as the hatchet-faced village butcher Annette in Blood, Actually, the Christmas special for Johnny Vegas’s series Murder, They Hope.
“It’s a got a beginning, a middle and an end,” she says almost proudly of the goofy, League of Gentlemen-meets-Wickerman-style spoof which sees the newly married Terry and Gemma reluctantly embroiled in the case of a serial killer seemingly intent on taking out every participant in a Santa competition in a tight-knit rural community.
Starring an array of reliable mid-brow comic talent, including Anita Dobson and Lee Mack, it’s the TV equivalent of cosy crime with a large brandy-sized ladle of English silliness swirled in. “It probably sounds a bit old-fashioned. But that’s the sort of comedy I respond to.”
Horrocks, 59, doesn’t care for fashion. Not for her a career built on awards and magazine covers and audience ratings. For someone with such bankable comic talent, many of her choices in the last few years have been determinedly personal, below the radar and self-generated. There was If You Kiss Me, Kiss Me in 2016 – a piece in which Horrocks performed her favourite new wave covers; Cotton Panic!, a devised show about the Lancashire cotton industry at the Manchester International Festival in 2017; and Love Pants, the 2022 Radio 4 drama she created about her late 1980s relationship with the singer Ian Drury.
