Perhaps she adds quizzically as if the idea is only just now beginning to

Perhaps,” she adds, quizzically, as if the idea is only just now beginning to dawn, “perhaps that’s why I’ve taken this latest job.”This latest job, as she would have it, is a role in the Royal Shakespeare Company, in which Greig will, at last, fully stretch herself as an act-or. In one sense, I guess, I could carry on doing this kind of work for ever, couldn’t I? At least until everybody loses interest in me, anyway It’s comfortable, it’s regular, it pays the bills … It has been pointed out to Greig, rather uncharitably, that she has simply played the same character over and over again. Each is put-upon and dizzy, each beguilingly silly.”Yes, I suppose you could say I’ve been typecast,” she considers, “but I hope not too much. In 1997, she starred alongside Dylan Moran and Bill Bailey in the Channel 4 comedy Black Books, and after the career-defining success of Green Wing, David Renwick, the creator of Victor Meldrew, wrote the feelgood BBC1 sitcom Love Soup especially for her.

While this sustained her for much of the following decade, she also did a bit of theatre and made intermittent forays into television: there were bit parts in the crime detective series Wycliffe, in The Lenny Henry Show, and in adverts for Diet Coke. Her first role came in 1991, two years after completing a drama degree at Birmingham University, when she landed the part of Debbie Aldridge in Radio 4’s long-running soap opera The Archers. “I’m rather glad my mum and dad don’t have to watch it because I think they would have been quite embarrassed.”And why don’t they watch it?She throws me a harsh glare that’s only slightly ironic: “Well, probably because they are dead,” she says.Oops.Greig has been a professional actress for 15 years now. “And then there was the toe-fucking incident,” she whispers, cheeks reddening at having uttered the F-word. This is a reference to – well, to the toe-fucking incident (and we’ve not enough space here to go into that one).

In the first series, a 49-year-old harridan slept with a young doctor whom she realised only afterwards was in fact her son. But, oh, I think it has such heart, such a soft and beautiful heart at the centre.”She does admit, though, that even she blanches at, as she puts it, the “sex stuff”. “It’s a weird show, really weird, and many have accused it of being style over content, that it simply relies on technical jiggery-pokery. Last year, Greig picked up a Royal Television Society award for her performance, as well as a Bafta nomination for Best Actress But its success has also prompted an awful lot of flak f”I can see why some people are undecided,” she muses.

She is, I tell the actress, absolutely adorable.”Really?” she says. “But she’s annoying, too, right? She’s a right pain in the arse.”Green Wing has been a deservedly big hit with audiences and (most) critics. Among the weirdos and wackos is Greig’s character, Doctor Caroline Todd, a comparative oasis of kooky calm amid the chaos.”I suppose you have to see the world through somebody’s eyes in the show,” she reasons, “and that’s what Caroline Todd is there for.”Greig’s character is the kind of woman who is hapless at work and hopeless in love, all teeth and bed hair, and with her blouse tucked unwittingly into her knickers If there is a door in front of her, she will walk into it. It’s no great talent, if you really stop and think about it.”For the past few weeks now, Tamsin Greig has been looking exquisitely surprised on the telly because Green Wing has returned to Channel 4 for its triumphant second series. Green Wing remains the most deliciously surreal programme on the box, a warped comedy set among the corridors of a hospital in which patients are nothing but a minor aside in the dysfunctional lives of its erratic, certifiable staff.

She asks me as many questions as I do her, and at one point warns me not to misquote her – “I remember everything I say” – and begs me not to be a “bastard” when I come to write this up. She picks up her toast but changes her mind, and puts it back down again.”So, what do you want to know?” she asks, with mock seriousness “Because I don’t really do much Basically, my job is to look surprised on the telly That’s all. Sometimes, she says, she can go off on tangents and doesn’t know how to find her way back again, even when she has something to plug, like now. We are here to talk ostensibly about some Shakespeare she is doing in Stratford-upon-Avon, but this charmingly wayward woman won’t quite stay on topic. She doesn’t do many interviews because, as an actress, “it’s my job to be other people – I feel weird being myself in front of you”.