Rebecca Front has been on our screens for more than three decades, flexing those comedy and drama muscles in shows from The Thick of It and Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge to Lewis and Poldark. Lately, however, she has stepped away from TV sets and taken to her garden shed. Not to pot her begonias, but to record her new podcast, Three People.
A self-confessed podcast junkie, Front decided it was time to create her own. “Podcasts have taken the place of Twitter for me. Now, I pick up my phone in the morning to see which ones have updated. I’m afraid it’s an awful cliché but, because I’m a middle-aged woman, I love true crime. Though, more than anything, I just love a good conversation,” she says.
The premise of her podcast is that guests pick out three people who changed their life in some way. She credits husband, producer-turned-writer Phil Clymer (with whom she has two grown-up children, Tilly and Oliver), with the concept.
“My husband is one of these people who seems to find ideas incredibly easy. He said: ‘What you need is a simple structure – like, I don’t know, who are the three people who changed your life?’ And I said ‘OK, I’ll do that,’” she says.
“We did a pilot and, when I listened back, it felt like I was pretending to be Sarah Montague [of Radio 4’s Today] – and a very poor imitation. What I needed to do was relax, let them talk and say, ‘That’s really interesting’.
“We’re very sociable in our house, we have a lot of Sunday lunches and people around the table, and I wanted it to feel like that, almost like a party game.”
Front’s inaugural guest is Armando Iannucci, the brains behind The Thick of It and The Day Today, the series that gave Alan Partridge his first screen airing – and who, gloriously, Iannucci chooses as one of his three people.
Also featured on the podcast is Malcolm Tucker himself, Peter Capaldi – who chooses Iannucci as one of his people. “I confess he would probably be one of my choices as well,” smiles Front.
When she was a teen, Front, who is now 60, suffered PTSD after witnessing her dad almost drown and her grandfather dying within a week of starting secondary school. As a result, another choice of hers would be an old teacher who changed the course of her life.
“I became school-phobic and this woman, in the space of an hour, listened to my problems and sorted them out,” she says. “My parents, psychologists, the head from my previous school, no one could get me back into mainstream education. And then this woman met me for the first time and went: ‘Oh, I know what to do.’
“I was terrified of leaving my mum, because I thought something would happen to her. It didn’t cross my mind that I could go to school and have my mum with me, because it’s absurd, but this teacher said: ‘What about if your mum was in our library?’ She wrote children’s stories and so she did it there and I could go and check on her at any time. After four days, I said, ‘You’re fine, go back home’.”
Front went on to study at Oxford, where she became the first female president of the Oxford Revue. “That was me wanting to thank my teacher. I remember telling her: ‘I’m going to try to be head girl and live out all my dreams.’”
The next move for the podcast is to look outside an address book filled with the great and good of TV and comedy, and widen the guests out to scientists and politicians.
Someone on Front’s wish list is Theresa May. “I find her slightly enigmatic,” she smiles. “When that story came out about her running through fields of wheat [being the naughtiest thing she’d done] as a child, I was taking the mickey, like everybody else, and my son and daughter said: ‘Mum, you wouldn’t even have done that.’ And it’s true. I’m an incredibly rule-abiding goody two shoes. But since Theresa May gave up politics, she is quite revealing and quite intriguing.”
On the acting side, Front will be “popping up” later in the year in The Hack, a Jack Thorne drama about the phone-hacking scandal, but she has treated herself to a quiet spell of late.
“I had two years that were full-on. Post-pandemic, lots of things suddenly got greenlit and there were back-to-back projects. I was on planes, backwards and forwards. It’s quite exhausting, so I thought, ‘Maybe I won’t do that for a bit, maybe I’ll relax and walk the dog.’ Now I’m up for getting on and doing some more frenetic things again.”
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