Pony tales

BLOOD was streaming down my arms and legs," recalls Fiona Allen, with a sickly smile. "I had to walk out of the wreck as a zombie. It was really gruesome." It was a television commercial - part of a Government strategy to reduce drink-driving in the summer months - and it needed blood and guts. But not quite so much, the taste police decided. The bloodied and battered Fiona who emerged from the mangled metal to the tune of Mungo Jerry's In The Summertime was censored. It was an inauspicious start to a TV career.

That was in 1993, when Fiona now a star of the Channel 4 sketch show Smack The Pony, alongside Sally Phillips and Doon Mackichan was entirely unknown and desperate for work. These days, she's rather busier. In the past year, she has blackmailed Mike Baldwin in Coronation Street, murdered Martin Clunes in the BBC's Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and won an Emmy award for the Channel 4 series.

Allen arrived in London from her native Lancashire seven years ago, having quit her job as a receptionist at Manchester's Hacienda Club to try and make it in show business with "just 500 quid in my back pocket". She recalls: "At first, I lived in a little cottage in Enfield - some idiot had told me it was London. I thought it was awful. It was full of orange women and blokes called Gary with Ford Escorts." Yet she was glad to be shot of her home town, Bury.

"It's a back end in the middle of nowhere - I had to get away." The thought of Bury Convent Grammar School gates still makes her shudder. Surprisingly, she got on no better when her parents packed her off, at the age of 18, to drama school in Salford. "I used to be thrown out of the Chekhov and Ibsen classes for trying to make these subjects funny. I'd spend my days in the pub next door, playing pool.

"The North did nothing for me," she says. "I grew up knowing I did not belong there, that it was not my destiny." Meanwhile, after three months down here, she was "desperately homesick, broke and about to go back to her parents". Then came that ad.

All this time, Allen was writing stand-up material, improving her act and toughening herself up on the London comedy circuit. What were her comedy influences? "My dad likes Bernard Manning," she says. But, she rejected the "obviously racist" genre of Northern club comedy. She describes her style as "observational storytelling". In her broad Lancashire accent, Allen spins yarns about growing up in the North with two fusspot older sisters and a Spanish fusspot mother who constantly gets her English phrases wrong.

SHE seems to have a love-hate relationship with her heritage. This took another turn last year, when she spent months in Manchester playing the nemesis of Coronation Street wheeler-dealer Mike Baldwin - Julia Stone, who seduced and blackmailed him. Allen hated the public attention it brought.

"It was terrible. I couldn't go anywhere. Whenever I tried, people would shout things like 'Oi! Mike's looking for you'."

To add to the confusion, her real-life fianc" is also called Mike - TV producer Michael Parkinson, son of the famous chat-show host. She says they are "totally in love". The couple have moved into a three- bedroom flat in west London and plan to get married in the summer.

"I met him on a TV show and we went out a few times before I knew his surname," she says. "When he told me, I thought: 'What idiot would call him that?' Then the penny dropped."

Allen is inviting her comedy-circuit mates to the wedding. "If someone sneezes at the reception, there will be 20 one-liners," she smiles. "All of them unfunny."

* Smack The Pony, Channel 4, tomorrow, 9.30 pm.

Copyright 2000
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