How a Bond girl and femme fatale became a Funny Woman

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If you’re going to star in a TV show called Funny Woman you’d better have some comic chops. Luckily Gemma Arterton, the British actress who came to prominence as a Bond girl and femme fatale, has plenty more strings to her bow.

“I’ve played cold, hard-arsed bitches, I’ve masterminded heists three times and I’ve been kidnapped,” she says, referring to roles in The Disappearance of Alice Creed, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters and the forthcoming Disney heist epic Culprits. “But physical comedy is a passion of mine and there’s something about Barbara that I connected with: her sense of humour and what she comes up against.”

Gemma Arterton shows her passion for comedy playing Barbara Parker in Funny Woman.Credit: Foxtel

The Barbara she refers to in Funny Woman is Barbara Parker, a Blackpool beauty queen who knows she’s capable of much more than just parading about in her knickers. She heads to the bright lights of London, where a chance meeting with a talent agent (Rupert Everett) sets her on a course towards sitcom superstardom. But stardom for a funny woman in ’60s London meant something very different to what it means now.

“Women,” Arterton says, “were just like accessories in comedy then. British comedy, maybe all comedy, was just so sexist at that time. If you got a role at all it was a sexualised part like something in Carry On or Benny Hill. It wasn’t until the likes of The Liver Birds [Carla Lane’s groundbreaking 1969 Liverpudlian comedy] or Victoria Wood that women were having their own shows and getting punchlines and having their own voice.”

Barbara Parker isn’t a trailblazer for progressive gender politics by inclination, says Arterton. “She’s a doofus! She’s this comic, northern, fun, exuberant, totally effervescent woman.”

But trailblazer is how she winds up. In the show, Barbara finds herself immersed in a world run by male TV executives and “tweedy posh lads with pipes”, as she calls them, a clique of Oxbridge writers and producers with nasal accents and an expensive education who see her as raw material to be exploited as they see fit. In real life, this Oxbridge elite ruled over the comedy world until the emergence of the so-called “alternative comedy” scene of the 1980s, when the likes of French and Saunders and later Jo Brand began to break through.

“Barbara speaks up for herself, she knows innately what’s right,” says Arterton. “She has flaws and she’s ambitious, but she’s a good egg. I love her. Some of the characters I’ve played before tended to be a little more … poised. They were switched-on, strong women. Whereas in real life, I’m quite, well … fun I suppose. Not stupid, I hope, but basically a bit more Barbara-like.”

Funny Woman, adapted by British comic actress and writer Morwenna Banks (who also happens to be the voice of Mummy Pig on Peppa Pig) from Nick Hornby’s novel, is a story not only of sexism but class snobbery too: Barbara is working class and starts out in a Blackpool factory making sticks of rock.

“The theme throughout the show,” says Arterton, “is how Barbara tries to relate to the showbiz world, being who she is and where she’s from.”

Which is why Arterton feels connected with the woman she’s playing. She too has come up against the showbiz industry and its rank prejudices. In 2015 she said that she had been director Jonathan Glazer’s first choice for his sci-fi film Under the Skin, but the role went to Scarlett Johansson because the film needed “a bigger star” in order to get funding. She has also been a vocal campaigner for Time’s Up and #MeToo.

Gemma Arterton as Agent Fields with Daniel Craig in the Bond movie, Quantum of Solace.

“Barbara struggles with people judging her on physical appearance, rather than who she is and what she can do, and that happens with a lot of women in workplaces,” says Arterton. She cites her own natural working-class estuary accent as a stick that’s been used to beat her. “It’s different now at drama school but in my day [Arterton went to London’s prestigious RADA], we were told to lose the accent or you’d only play maids.”

Arterton has never been afraid to speak up. Her two most recent projects, Funny Woman and the forthcoming Disney+ heist drama Culprits, have both been TV series. Prior to that she has worked predominantly in film. She sees how the entertainment landscape is changing.

“Content. I hate that word. But most of the people I’m working with come from film where they’re making an hour and a half of content. Suddenly we’re making six or eight hours work in maybe twice as much time. It’s all getting a little bit too frantic. If this is the way it’s going to be now – we’re going to make loads of TV because people love it – then the film-making people need to work out what the best way is to do it. Not to complain because it’s all good work but it’s way more crammed in. It’s got a bit much and I think we’re going to have to change the way these things are run.”

Spoken like Barbara Parker herself – a Funny Woman, sure, but one with something important to say.

Funny Woman screens on Foxtel’s Showcase, Tuesdays at 8.30pm and on demand.

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