Posh pissed English woman – that’s me, smoking,” says Sarah Parish, taking a drag on an imaginary cigarette. The laugh she emits moments later, throaty and faintly lascivious, sounds like a car engine turning over.
The archetypal role she’s talking about, in films and TV, is in the likes of Christmas staple The Holiday (2006), as the sozzled Daily Telegraph editor to Kate Winslet’s lovesick columnist; patchy romcom The Wedding Date (2005), as the perennially worse-for-wear TJ; and across three series of BBC drama Mistresses, as a GP whose penchant for the wine rack is as liberal as her approach to medical ethics.
