Downton Abbey’s Samantha Bond on new ITV drama Home Fires: 'I'm very proud of this'

ACTRESS Samantha Bond heads up the cast of ITV’s new wartime drama Home Fires

Downton Abbey, actress, Samantha Bond, ITV, drama, Home Fires, interview, Tom AtkinsonPH

ACTRESS Samantha Bond heads up the cast of ITV’s new wartime drama Home Fires

From flirting outrageously with 007 as Miss Moneypenny to being treated rather shabbily by Nigel Havers in Downton Abbey as Lady Rosamund Painswick, Samantha Bond is never far from a great British hit.

So the news that she’s leading the cast of new six-part Second World War drama Home Fires is very welcome indeed, and Samantha thinks it could be another winner.

“I’m very proud of this,” says the 53-year-old actress. “It was one of the happiest shoots that I have ever been involved in. It has a fantastic energy to it and a fantastic honesty. 

I don’t know why these things come together. It’s a little bit of alchemy!” 

It was one of the happiest shoots that I have ever been involved in

Samantha Bond

Alchemy wasn’t the only skill required for the part though, not least because the drama, which centres round a Cheshire village’s Women’s Institute when the men head off to war, was based on a Julie Summers book called Jambusters.

“The jam making was great fun and we had all the proper 1939 equipment,” says Samantha.

“You had to be very careful not to burn yourself because jam gets very hot. The day that we collected the blackberries, we had stunning weather.

I don’t know what happened in Cheshire in the autumn last year, but we filmed in September, October, November and the start of December and I think we had two days of rain.”

The actress got to use a skill she already possessed and, unsurprisingly, it’s thanks to yet another huge show she’s been in.

“I have actually made jam, yes,” she admits. “I had to learn for The Great Sport Relief Bake Off. It went beautifully at home and then it went horribly wrong in the tent!”

Home FiresPH

'I'm very proud of this. It has fantastic energy and fantastic honesty'

Still, even if she couldn’t impress Mary Berry with her cooking, Samantha would probably win her over with her no-nonsense approach to life, and she says that she would have been quite happy to muck in with the wartime make-do-and-mend of her character, Frances Barden.

“I was brought up by a mother who had lived through the war,” she says. “She would have been in her mid-teens when it broke out. We used to make our own clothes and I find this modern dispensing of things difficult.”

It certainly gives Samantha a good grounding to play Frances, and she says that the drama is all about the practical changes that war forced upon communities.

“We’re used to seeing the men go off to fight in the trenches, but this is what the women do at home and it is both their emotional struggle, because half of them have a husband or son who has disappeared to war, and then it is what you do as a community to support the war effort. So there is that whole emotional roller coaster that everyone is on while being immensely practical.”

The opportunity to show a female perspective was important for Samantha and she found the largely female cast a godsend.

“It was thrilling to be among so many women,” she says. “I have been banging on for the last five years about the invisibility of the middle-aged woman and suddenly we went to a read-through and I thought, ‘There’s a hundred of us!’ And really great actors. It’s an interesting cast list in that we haven’t got a TV star – we’ve just got a lot of women who are superb actors.”

The fact that such a strong female cast is a rarity on British television isn’t lost on her.

“I suppose I should just be gracious and say I am relieved it finally has happened,” Samantha concedes. “But it does feel like it has been a long time coming, to be honest.”

Home Fires may or may not represent a new dawn for female-led drama, but its period genre is nothing new for Samantha. 

“I have seemed to do quite a lot in a corset,” she admits. “It was quite nice not to be in a corset on this occasion. I have been known to take my corset off and just sit very straight and then no one knows!”

Home fires, Tomorrow, 9PM, ITV

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