Sky Max's Funny Woman: Gemma Arterton talks about her role as a Blackpool beauty-queen who wants to be a comedian

The mini-series is a TV adaptation based on Nick Hornby’s bestselling 2016 novel Funny Girl.

It follows Barbara Parker (Played by Gemma Arterton) – a brash beauty queen who journeys from Blackpool to London on a mission to reinvent herself and find her voice in the male-dominated world of the 1960s sitcom.

The Kent-born actress said: “I just loved the character. There’s something about her I connected with; I think it’s her sense of humour and her wit and what she comes up against.”

It’s the height of the swinging 60s and having just been crowned Miss Blackpool, she feels there must be more to life than being a beauty queen in a seaside town.

She added: “She wants more from life than just being a beauty queen, working in a rock shop and becoming a wife. So she goes to London to try and make it as something – and finds herself auditioning for a Comedy Playhouse. From there on it’s the journey of her becoming a sitcom star and finding her voice.”

37 year old Arterton can recognise some of the barriers faced by her character, in an era when women were expected to be "flirty, fabulous and fertile " and not funny.

She added: “I think we’ve come so far, even just since the MeToo movement…but there’s still an undercurrent because old-school people still work in the industry.But definitely in my earlier stuff, with accents and things, people going, ‘Oh you’ve got (a regional accent)’ – I don’t any more. I’ve chickened out and taken on some other accent but there was a little bit of that.”

To get into Parker’s performative mindset, Arterton watched hours of Lucille Ball in American ‘50s sitcom I Love Lucy and researching comedy of the era.And the Quantum Of Solace star sees how Parker can be a role model for modern girls. “She is a bit of a doofus as well, a ‘dippy doodle’, that’s what she calls herself...she can’t help but speak up for herself. Whether she feels like she should or shouldn’t, she ends up doing it. And that’s just who she is.”Meanwhile the physical makeover took some adjusting to, admits Arterton, who had to don a bouffant blonde wig for the part.

“On day one, the day of the poster, blue dress, the hair, I remember looking in the mirror and thinking, ‘Whoa, I’ve got blue eyeshadow on, a big blonde wig and I don’t look like myself’. I felt a bit clowny but it really helped me to let go,” she says, having also perfected the Blackpool dialect.The ensemble cast includes Rupert Everett as Barbara’s agent Brian; David Threlfall as Barbara’s father George; Tom Bateman as charming actor Clive; and Arsher Ali as straight-laced love interest Dennis.Funny Woman is available on Sky Max and streaming service NOW from Thursday February 9.