What is next for Tate?

Now that her spell as Doctor Who's assistant has come to a dramatic conclusion, Catherine Tate talks to Jasper Rees about her return to the stage - and her ambition to play one of Shakespeare's great comic heroines

Last year, in Tony Blair's final weeks in office, Catherine Tate found herself wearing school uniform at Number 10 while teaching the Prime Minister to act. She had infiltrated his office with the assistance of Comic Relief.

Catherine Tate: 'People think comedy is acting-lite'
In dialogue with her uppity teenage character Lauren, the rookie thespian was having difficulty landing his punchline.

"He knew his lines and he was very very good to work with," Tate recalls.
"Just on the last take, which is the take we used, he wasn't quite getting the intonation right and he said to me, 'Do it for me, just do it for me and then I can copy it.' And I said to him, 'It's am I bovvered?' He was slightly going, 'Am I bovvered?'"

Twenty years ago, when Tate passed into drama school at the fourth attempt, there were many scenarios she wouldn't have dreamed of coming to pass. Converting to stand-up by the end of her third year. Spending years frustrated in minor roles.

Earning the chance to star in her own sketch show. Creating a character whose catchphrase became so ubiquitous that she was improbably blamed for the venal sins of hoodie culture. Becoming Doctor Who's assistant. But, of all these turns of events, it was instructing the PM how to say "bovvered" that really strained credibility.

"My first reaction was disbelief," she says of learning that Comic Relief and Downing Street had fixed it for her to work with Blair. "I thought, that can't be true. That can't be possible."
It's as a result of this circuitous odyssey that, at 40, Tate is at last free to return to the place she always used to imagine would be her second home: the stage. "When I was in drama school," she says, "I had a rather sentimental view that it would all be like J?B Priestley's The Good Companions and I'd just be doing plays all my life."

In fact she has only been on stage twice in seven years (unless you count her two-week stint in The Exonerated reading the testimonies of people released from death row). She returns in a revival of Under the Blue Sky, David Eldridge's six-hander about tortuous romance in the teaching profession.

Tate's presence in a cast alongside Francesca Annis and The It Crowd's Chris O'Dowd allows the play to be seen by a larger audience than greeted its premiere in the tiny Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 2000. It's a short, intense piece, with three intriguingly interwoven half-hour scenes, each with a pair of characters in various states of amorous disrepair.

In the middle scene, Tate plays Michelle, the common-room nymphomaniac who, after her most recent dumping, throws herself vengefully into the arms of an admiring colleague.
Thanks to his under-performance, their coupling is a comically brief affair, after which she proceeds to rip him to shreds. It's a part with an array of colours, but didn't that disastrous sex scene give her pause?

"I haven't seen a part where I've thought, oh I'm born to do that, but I certainly thought I could have a fair crack at this," Tate says. "Michelle is not a particularly likeable character.
And yet I have to like her in order to play her. I hope it's a chance to be brave. I've never made that choice to be so full-on, sexually. But I couldn't not do the job just in case it was going to be a bit too embarrassing in rehearsals."

The last time she was on the West End stage it was in Neil Labute's Some Girls, when David Schwimmer's name in lights was selling the tickets. It was during the run of the play in the summer of 2005 that Tate finally came up from under the radar.

She'd won the British Comedy Award for best newcomer, appeared on Comic Relief as Lauren mocking the cherubic members of McFly, and then the transmission of the second series of her sketch show was given a big push by BBC2.

"I'm very grateful that things worked out and I'm doing what I love to do. But I'm not any better an actor now than when no one knew who I was. I'm under no illusions. I know the way things work. I know it's because lots of people are saying 'Am I bovvered?'.

"I had wanted to do a play for quite a long time. My preference was to be in an ensemble, which sounds a bit odd given that I had a show title with my name in it."

The Catherine Tate Show is deep in mothballs, with no plans for a resumption. Lauren has been killed off, though not because of her allegedly malign influence on Britain's lippy youth. "If you were to dissect it," says Tate, "she is actually quite bright, she can speak French, she knows Shakespeare and she's never sworn.

She is rude to her teachers but gets her comeuppance for that. She never wins. The ultimate thing was having someone say 'Am I bovvered?' back at her, which we got the Prime Minister to do. So I kind of felt then we had to kill her."

There is always the possibility of a stage tour in the manner of Little Britain, though Tate would want to do more than just sprint round four aircraft-hangar venues. The sketch show was largely filmed in front of an audience, and every new character and sketch was road-tested at the Soho Theatre before it was filmed.

"There's nothing like live. You get that connection with an audience. It would have been a very different thing if it had all been shot on location. But I'm very aware that Little Britain were on tour for nearly two years straight and it's not as easy to do when you've got a young family."
Now that her stint as the chirpy temp Donna in Doctor Who is over, what she'd really like to do is Shakespeare. She discreetly admits ("I think it always sounds a bit desperate when people say what they would like to do") that the comic heroine she'd really like to have a crack at is Beatrice.

As the National and the RSC have just done Much Ado, Shakespeare's Globe ought to get on the blower. Her one fear is that she might have a job persuading serious theatres that she's up to Shakespeare.

"I'm not in the camp that thinks that comedy is a lesser art. People say, 'Oh you're acting now.' With Doctor Who there was a lot of, 'Oh, why have they asked her?' There's a snobbery attached to comedy.

They think it's acting-lite. It has this connotation that you are not really as good as the proper people."

'Under the Blue Sky' opens at the Duke of York's Theatre, London WC2 (0870 060 1483), on July 25.