It's your first big lead role, your name pops up on screen straight after the title, and your proud dad is sitting next to you as the action begins. Nice period costumes, a music hall in full song… the Victorians enjoyed such simple pleasures, didn't they?
Uh-oh, here it comes now: the sex scene. The sex scene with the woman! Any second now, that old brass bed is going to creak like hell! What are you supposed to say to your father at times likes these?
"Eyes on sandals!" says Rachael Stirling. "That's what I shouted at him when all these naked breasts hove into view. That's what he used to shout at me when I was a girl and there was some snogging on Dynasty which he didn't think was suitable for me to watch. No parent wants to see their child as a sex object. But afterwards he gave me a hug and said: ?Well done.'"
Stirling, 25, is part of a dynasty herself. Her mum is Dame Diana Rigg, who's just been voted the sexiest telly star of all time for her karate-kicking exploits in spray-on, wet-look black leather in The Avengers. But pleasures were simpler then, too. Mum never kicked up the kind of storm her daughter is currently doing with the lezzies-on-the-licence-fee shockeroonee that is Tipping The Velvet.
"BBC face obscenity row over shocking new lesbian drama," snorted the Daily Mail the other day. In Mail-speak, this kind of headline is known as a "marmalade dropper", meaning it's perfectly capable of bringing breakfast in the Home Counties to a spluttering standstill.
Stirling — whose father is the Scottish landowner, Archie Stirling — smirks and carries on drinking her morning cuppa in London's Langham Hotel. She's wearing a dark blue suit and ballet pumps. Her brown hair, cut in a straggly bob and tugged at constantly, matches her eyes, which in turn match those of her mum. The family resemblance is striking, although she says she's sometimes mistaken for Martine McCutcheon.
"The BBC made me jump through fiery hoops to get this part," she says. "I'm not a big star and they didn't think I could pull it off. The sex is crucial to the story and I don't think it's the most explicit you've ever seen. It's only because it involves two women that everyone's getting their knickers in a twist. I mean, it's only love."
Stirling is tall, beautiful and actressy-intense. You get the feeling she's rarely been frivolous in her life. She went to university — Edinburgh — rather than drama college because she thought it would stimulate her brain more. In her student days, she didn't much like the look of herself, and Britpack artist Jenny Saville's naked fat women gave her an idea for her dissertation. "It was called Jenny Saville In Excess: The Empowerment Of Women In An Age Of Oppressive Body Politics," she groans. "I'm better now!"
The most often-asked question during this promotional whirl — from men who know they will never get the chance — has been: What was it like kissing Keeley Hawes? Stirling says: "I know Keeley and we both just thought: "Wow! Fuck! Right, let's get on with it." She swears a lot, in the way that people with posh accents often do — in jubilation — as if they've just learned the words. Or maybe she's nervous.
"Kissing another actress is no different from kissing an actor, it's fairly mechanical. And in this, by the time you see Keeley and I kiss, you're absolutely gagging for it to happen."
With a giggle straight out of a girls' dorm, she says Tipping The Velvet is "Victorian for munching the carpet". Based on the novel by Sarah Waters, the three-parter reunites her with Andrew Davies, TV's pre-eminent dramatist, for whom she was a brazen Lulu in Othello. "In that I had this great line: ?I used to shag people out of politeness. They only had to say ?Hi Lulu' and I would have my knickers down.'" This time, Stirling is more innocent, at least at the start.
She plays the teenage Nan Astley, who works in her father's whelk parlour on the Kent coast. "I didn't see how my life would have any surprises waiting in it," she says in flashback. Then she goes to see some music-hall: comedians, a ventriloquist… and what's this: a boy singing songs who's really a girl?
Nan falls under the spell of Kitty Butler (played by Hawes), becoming her dresser, her stage sidekick, then her lover. "It's a fantastic role," says Stirling. "Nan follows Kitty to London only to come home one night and find her in bed with a man. She quits the act and becomes destitute, but as a girl she gets harassed a lot on the street. So she becomes a rent-boy, then the live-in-lover of a very rich woman in St John's Hill, then a socialist… I mean, have you ever come across a story as amazing as that?"
Stirling was attracted to the role by her character's voyage of self-discovery and her own life to date has been an eventful trip. Born in London, she grew up in Scotland, but, contrary to legend, the Stirlings at the time — her parents divorced in 1993 — did not own all of Stirlingshire.
"It wasn't a Jane Austenesque childhood. Yes, the house was beautiful, but it wasn't a castle. It didn't have, you know, wings. What was I like as a kid? A complete nightmare, I'm sure. Energetic, always riding my pony and swimming in rivers — and pretty self-contained. Well, there weren't any kids living next door."
She's just back from visiting her father and, although she's now based in London (with her DJ boyfriend John Lycett-Green), she still calls Scotland home. "This is going to sound a bit slushy but I feel like Vivien Leigh in Gone With The Wind about it: I've got to go there, just to touch the earth. And every time I come back down south, England just seems so small and petty. Scotland's got this vastness, those huge hills where no-one's ever going to build a… what's the word?… a suburb."
She gets defensive about her parents, and any privilege they might have bestowed on her. Her father, she insists, isn't enormously wealthy. If you're a landowner these days, "nine cases out of ten you're in deficit". Foot-and-mouth was a "kick in the guts" for him as it was for so many others. And she's at pains to stress her mother did not smooth the path for her as an actress.
"I got into acting because it was the only thing that fulfilled me. But I got into it by myself. I joined the National Youth Theatre undercover, no-one knew who Mama was. It's been a blessing and a curse being the daughter of Diana Rigg. I'm hugely proud of her and have learned a vast amount from her. But I had to find out for myself if I was any good at this, and before I could, people were making comparisons. That was fucking frustrating. I've never once gotten through a door because Mama's made a call. Well, she might have helped me get an audition, but never a job."
Stirling won't talk about her parents' split, which happened after her father had an affair with Joely Richardson, other than to say she now enjoys a great relationship with both of them. She has two older brothers. "One's a writer and the other, well, I can't say… he's a builder."
She can be a bit touchy about the posh question, too. "I don't think I am… I mean I didn't go to balls. OK, I went to one, called the Northern Meeting. But no-one filled in my dance card. No dashing white sergeant whisked me off my feet. I was a big, big lass, you see."
She didn't have a boyfriend at pony-club camp either, and also drew a blank at "tenner-for-a-snog parties". She says: "I didn't start to feel remotely attractive until I was 21." En route to this minor epiphany, she went to Wycombe Abbey, a girls' boarding school.
There were initiation ceremonies, including "density baths": if the water rose above a set level the other girls put you on a diet. "You were also allocated ?pashes' with the older girls which meant you had to make their bed and wash their knickers." Bearing in mind the theme of Tipping The Velvet, did she ever have a crush on one? "I don't think so. I thought they were all fantastically cool, but that was because they got to wear clogs."
Stirling is serious-minded, but funny with it. She's still analysing — maybe even agonising — about some of the events and circumstances that have brought her to this precise moment in her life. But the moment is undoubtedly a good one. "For the first time in my career I think I can say about Tipping The Velvet that I couldn't have done a job any better." So, at last, maybe she could get to wear the clogs.
