New TV role for actress Jodie Whittaker in Royal Wedding programme

May 12 2010 Huddersfield Daily Examiner

HUDDERSFIELD actress Jodie Whittaker is back on our TV screens next week.

She stars in a drama forming part of the BBC’s look back at the 1980s.

Royal Wedding, which airs on BBC2 at 9pm on Monday, was created by Abi Morgan and highlights one of the events of the decade.

Everyone remembers where they were on July 29, 1981, when the marriage of Lady Diana Spencer and Prince Charles captured the nation’s attention.

Jodie herself wasn’t even born on the day the TV cameras captured all the pomp and ceremony from St Paul’s Cathedral.

But she was delighted to be cast in a drama set in a small Welsh town, preparing to mark the happy day.

Jodie plays Linda Caddock, the mother of young Tammy who sets out to organise a street party to celebrate the big event.

“It’s just a brilliant piece about people and family and community,” says Jodie.

“It looks at what happens when the workplace gets closed down and how that has a ripple effect on everybody. In some ways it was a positive because Linda’s offered what she believes to be a life-changing amount of money and thinks ‘Oh, OK, I can do something with that.”’

Born a year after the drama is set, Jodie says she could still relate to the script: “It’s nostalgic but also feels incredibly relevant and quite present. It felt like I could understand it as a period, of wanting so much from a decade and then looking back in hindsight to see what actually happened.”

The same can perhaps be said for how we now perceive Charles and Diana’s marriage, but as depicted in the drama, the royal wedding gave people the chance to forget their problems and unite back in 1981.

In the drama, Jodie pulls off an impeccable Welsh accent that’s all the more impressive when you hear her speak in her deliciously broad Yorkshire accent.

She knew she wanted to act from a young age and assumed, now naively she says, that it would all just simply work out. And it has. On leaving school at 16, she did a BTec in performing arts before attending Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Within months she was playing love scenes opposite the legendary Peter O’Toole in the controversial film Venus and now, still only 28, Jodie appears to be on the cusp of even greater things.

It’s why she admits she has trouble relating to Linda, a woman only a couple of years older than herself, who already feels her life is over.

“It feels weird to us now I suppose, that late-twenties, early-thirties could feel like the end of your life, because we’ve moved on so much from that,” she says.

“Now you don’t even consider having kids until you’re 35, 36. It’s a weird leap in mind-set because now we think that age is the start of everything.”

Last September, the cast and crew took over an entire street in Glengower, near Aberystwyth to film Royal Wedding. Satellite dishes were removed and traffic halted to ensure the nostalgia of the period shone through.