Steve discusses working with Siobhan Finneran on Kate Thornton's White Wine Question Time
Transcript below:
Kate: Well next we’re going to move to a lady that, er, spent far too many many months lying on sun loungers with you in Benidorm. You’ve been in four productions with her but spent the longest poolside. It’s Siobhan Finneran.
Steve: Wow. Wow.
Siobhan: (on recording) Steve Pemberton is…very funny. He’s very clever. He’s annoyingly clever, in fact. But he would be the person that would be my phone a friend if I was on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
[Steve and Kate laugh]
Siobhan: I think we’ve worked on about four of the same jobs. We did Benidorm together for years. Erm, and last year I was very lucky cos I got to work with him twice. He came on, into the cast of Alma’s Not Normal and then I did an episode of Inside No. 9 which was such a treat to do it and be part of that amazing series and I was beyond delighted to have been asked. So yeah, Benidorm’s the thing I’ve done with him, I did with him the most and I’ve got, I mean, far too many memories of that show, and far too many memories that I probably can’t talk to you about.
[Steve and Kate laugh]
Siobhan: The one memory is that it was always fun. We always had an amazing time and roared with laughter most of the days. In fact, every day, to the point of probably driving the crew mad because we were corpsing that much. But what I do remember about that is when we first got the job, when I first got the job, Steve and I didn’t know each other and he got my number from a mutual friend of ours and rang me to sort of say, I’m gonna be playing your husband in this show and we’ll have… You know, we’ll have a good time, it’ll be good fun and… I just thought that was a really…really kind, generous thing to do and it sort of made me feel calmer about who I was gonna go and work with. He’s a very, very good friend. He’s also bloody cruel. And wicked. And I can’t ever forgive him for putting my name down, er, for karaoke to sing Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart because nobody, nobody should sing that except Bonnie Tyler.
[Steve and Kate laugh]
Siobhan: No matter how much drink you’ve had. He is the only person I’ve ever been on a bucking bronco with.
[Steve laughs]
Siobhan: And I think that’s probably gonna stay that way. But he is my favourite screen husband ever. And it’s gonna take a lot to, er, knock him off that pedestal. I love him.
Kate: Aw. How lovely is that?
Steve: That’s just incredible. Just incredible. I mean, um, yeah, we… Within minutes of meeting each other we clicked and got on. And, um, we’d actually met to do a, what they call a chemistry reading for Benidorm where, um, they are, you know, they’ve got their eye on certain people but they want to see how they interact together. And we sat down, met for the first time in this audition for Benidorm, and the director and writer and producer opposite, and they couldn’t shut us up. They couldn’t get a word in edgeways, we were just chatting away. And I think they knew even before we read the scene that, that the chemistry was definitely there. Um, so, yeah, and then…
Kate: Did you feel like bookends? Was that…was that the— Because that’s how you two came— I mean, it felt very easy on camera, watching that relationship play out.
Steve: It really was. You know, we both have our own families and partners, erm, but we just, we just got on and… And I love working with people who like to laugh, and Siobhan loves to laugh. She, erm, she brightens up any set, you know, um, she’s always finding stuff funny. And yeah, so I think the first scene we had to do, I was coming back with some hotdogs round the pool, and I nick some suncream off somebody walking past, and I said, “I just feel like I want to put the hotdog in between… [laughs] in your chest, right? And just sort of rub it up and down.” And she went, “Do it!” [laughs] Nowadays you’d have to have an intimacy coordinator and have fourteen meetings about it.
Kate: And HR, yeah?
[Steve and Kate laugh]
Steve: So, er, from that point on, where that sausage went up…
Kate: It was all good.
Steve: [laughs] We, we… Honestly, we laughed so much and we would go out on the weekends. Cos obviously sometimes we’d come home, but you’re out in Spain for, for a while. And we would go to karaoke bars and it was, it was like you were on holiday. It was like you were on holiday with your alternative family and, um…
Kate: Family.
Steve: Yeah. And Sheila Reid and young Oliver who played our son, who was eight when we started.
Kate: Yeah. Gosh.
Steve: We were like a little unit and, erm, yeah, I’ve got… And I’ve got so much respect for Siobhan as an actress as well, she was so brilliant to work with and she grounds… I mean, because Benidorm, it was interesting for me to go from League of Gentlemen to doing Benidorm. And a lot of people go, why’s he doing this? You know, you’re the, you’re the dark comedy guy. And I think… Well, I loved the scripts. I thought it was really funny. It harks back to that sort of northern working class, er, gags, great gags. Derren Litten, who wrote it, is a very, very funny writer and he got that banter between northern families spot on. Um, and the fact that it was for ITV and it was for a wide audience, I suddenly went, do you know what? We can all be snobs about stuff like that. There is such a big audience for, for that type of a show that you can just watch, have a laugh, enjoy the characters, it’s not going too deep, and it’s not going… You know, it’ll be emotional but it’s not necessarily doing what we did with Inside No. 9 or League of Gentlemen. But it can be a forgotten audience.
whitewine_questiontime This week one of the big and small screen’s most successful leading men @richardcarmitage is my guest on @whitewine_questiontime - and what a treat it was to have his velvet tones navigate some of his biggest moments: from performing in a school production of The Hobbit at the age of 11 to staring in The Hobbit itself, one of the biggest film trilogies in cinema history! We also chat about his time spent working in a circus and the brilliant books he’s written. 🤩 Listen wherever you get your podcasts today! (x)
