‘This could only happen on the radio,” Kim Cattrall says, from her home in Vancouver Island, of her new series Central Intelligence. “It would be much too expensive any other way.” She can say that again; the BBC Radio 4 podcast, with this incongruously glittering cast – Ed Harris also stars – tells the true story of the CIA, from its haphazard beginnings in the wreckage of postwar Europe, to 9/11, to the present day. Cattrall narrates as Eloise Page, nicknamed the “Iron Butterfly”, who became the first female station chief in 1978, but had been embedded in the agency since 1947, before it even had the name (previously, it was called the Central Intelligence Group). “It was a time when women were treated either as a mum, or as a secretary, which is just another kind of mum,” Cattrall says. “That’s why it’s so interesting to come at it from a woman’s point of view. Because Eloise owns this story.”
The last time I met Cattrall was at the apex of Sex and the City in 2002. I don’t think it’s speaking out of turn to say that her Samantha – sexually voracious, devil-may-care, caustically witty, living her best life – was the only thing that made the show anything like what people said it was: iconic, revolutionary. She said back then: “I don’t think there’s ever been a woman who has expressed so much sexual joy [on television] without her being punished. I never tire of women coming up and saying: ‘You’ve affected my life.’” In our interview today she mentions that role in passing, saying that she “tried to bring the truth about being a single woman in New York, the things that people might not know, the things I hadn’t seen before”.
