Kathy comes home
The Irish Post
London-Irish actress Kathy Burke has popped up again on our TV screens, this time in the form of an orange-bewigged flatmate nightmare hunting for a man. Joe Crilly reports.
Gimme Gimme Gimme is an odd couple scenario scripted by acclaimed playwright Jonathan Harvey. Kathy Burke plays down-at-heel Linda, who is hungry for love and passion. She shares a flat with her gay friend, Tom, played by James Dreyfus, who also hankers after the ideal mate, like the lyrics of the Abba song, ‘Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight’.
In last week’s first episode Linda, discovering a strange man in their flat after a night on the town, observed to Tom: “There’s a bloke in there and one of us must have slept with him.”
Kathy won best actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her role in the harrowing Nil By Mouth. She is also well-known for her Harry Enfield Show portrayals of teenager Perry, baby Lulu and Waynetta Slob. Her other movie roles have recently included parts in the sumptuous costume drama Elizabeth and the movie of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa.
Her father Paddy came from Galway and died just after she won the Royal Television Society’s Best Actress Award for her role in BBC TV’s Mr Wroe’s Virgins. Kathy is also the script editor on Gimme Gimme Gimme and she recalls what her father told her as he lay dying in hospital.
“He said: ‘I think you’re alright as an actress, but I do think you make a great writer’. He felt that acting came a bit easy to me, which it doesn’t. With acting he said it was just his daughter mucking about.”
By Joe Crilly
