Every so often people will peer at Lesley Sharp and ask the actor: "Have you been on telly?" If she says yes, the inevitable follow-up: "Well what have you been in?" And how to start answering that?
If it was me being asked, and I'd been in as much quality TV as Sharp, I'd probably say something like: Paul Abbott's Clocking Off, David Peace's Red Riding, Russell T Davies's Doctor Who, now off with you! But Sharp – petite, bright – is too nice for that. "I can't bring myself to start listing the CV. So I say, 'Bits and pieces of drama.. Otherwise it's icky."
She's been in a lot (as well as all the TV, two Mike Leigh films and The Full Monty, 20-plus years in theatre doing David Hare, Jim Cartwright, Sam Shepard and Caryl Churchill plays) and will soon appear in a high-end BBC 2 drama called The Shadow Line. It's a broody six-parter about cops and robbers, following both as they pass back and forth over an ambiguous moral line ("the shadow line" of the title). Sharp, 46, plays a woman suffering from early onset Alzeimer's: "The wife of Christopher Eccleston, a guy with a dodgy past, a drug trafficker. My character is a sort of heartland for Chris's, and the reason he's pulled back from the bad is to help her."
She speaks very precisely during our chat in a cafe near her south London home. And while I'm listening to her talk about The Shadow Line being "the sort of telly we used to make, great big come-and-sit-down stories, literary and filmic", it occurs to me she's got one of the nicest speaking voices I've heard. Actorly RP, gently accented by a Merseyside upbringing, spoken at about three-quarters the speed of most. I want to ask if she'd mind, when we're done, reading out the day's newspaper.
"Love telly," she says, accounting for her eloquence on the subject. She watches all sorts at the family home, where she lives with husband, actor Nicholas Gleaves, and two children. Box obsessions at the moment include Downton Abbey and Masterchef, and she's looking forward to Doctor Who restarting next weekend. Eccleston, the first Doctor of the rebooted Russell T Davies era, is a pal; the episode Sharp appeared in herself (possessed by an evil alien) had David Tennant in the title role. But she likes the new guy, Matt Smith, with his "unusual, voguey, sexy thing going on".
Intriguingly, Sharp was tipped by Davies in 2008 to one day be cast as the first female Doctor. "It was immensely flattering to hear but I think the chances of them getting an... old bird to play the Doctor are very slim." She laughs. "Anyway I think Matt Smith's doing a wonderful job, don't you?"
The Shadow Line starts on BBC2 in early May