Doon Mackichan: ‘If I hadn’t fought that battle, you would have seen me naked on an ITV drama’

Doon Mackichan: 'There’s so much gratuitous use of female flesh on TV’ - (Ben Meadows)

I’m very bad in interviews,” admits Doon Mackichan, about halfway through our interview. She means TV interviews. Hopefully. Mackichan has been in a slew of the most notable British comedies of the past 30 years – sitcoms such as I’m Alan Partridge, Two Doors Down, or Toast of London, as well as films like The Borrowers and Happy New Year, Colin Burstead – but you’ll barely ever see her interviewed on a chat show. “I find them excruciating,” she growls. “I find that the pressure is people always want me to be funny. But I might want to talk about militant politics!”

It becomes clear, pretty quickly, that Mackichan is categorically not bad at interviews. She’s open, expansive, funny, and righteously, outspokenly feminist. (It helps, of course, that this is a very un-TV environment: we’re in a cosy and unhostile meeting room somewhere in the upper floors of the National Theatre.) And her politics aren’t that militant, even if friends and family nicknamed her “Millie Tant” when she was in her twenties, after the crude feminist caricature in the Viz comics. Now 63, Mackichan reckons the old wisdom about growing more conservative as you grow older is a “myth – especially now”, she adds. “People say, ‘Oh, I have to send my kids to private school because they’re so clever,’ or, ‘Yeah, I need my second home.’ I mean, of course, we’re all hypocrites. I’m a hypocrite with the way I live – I still fly. I’m not hardcore. But if anything, I think I’m going the other way. I’m going even more to the left.”