SUE PERKINS can be excused for feeling nervous. She has taken on her first acting role in a decade and perhaps her biggest writing project ever – the new BBC2 sitcom Heading Out.

Her character, Sara, who runs a small vet’s practice, is “intellectually insecure”

and has a tendency to dress like a 12-yearold boy or “post-breakdown Britney”.

The actress, writer and presenter’s roots sit firmly in comedy. She and comedy partner Mel Giedroyc first found success as Mel and Sue at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, winning best newcomers’ award in 1993. Following that, they wrote sketches for French and Saunders before getting their own C4 show Light Lunch, in which they quizzed celebrity guests.

Since 2010, the pair have been busy presenting The Great British Bake Off. The Bafta-winning series will continue with Perkins still on board. However, for now, Heading Out is her priority.

She describes how a well-known comedy producer asked her why she is “doing this to herself”, putting herself through the slog and angst of writing a sitcom at this stage of her career. “He said, ‘you’re at a point where you can just cruise now’,” Perkins says.

“It is really hard to write a sitcom people like. People are really personal and nasty about them and all kinds of inflammatory – why am I doing it? I just thought, ‘well, I don’t want to coast, actually’.

“If you want to write, you should. People might not like it, but at least I tried and I would have always had the regret otherwise.”

So is she pleased with the outcome? “I don’t know, I mean, I am pretty pleased with the writing and I know the cast is solid gold. I can’t speak for my own performance because I am a novice, but they are just great, really funny,” she says.

Her self-deprecation seems a natural part of her personality, along with her snappy dry wit and chronic awkwardness. Sara shares similar traits plus, like Perkins, she’s a lesbian.

Perkins points out that Sara isn’t based on herself, although her experiences did inspire parts of the story. “People will think the main character is me, but it isn’t at all. I am shy and a bit awkward like her, but that isn’t my story about coming out and that’s not my parents,” she says.

“There are a few little relationships I have had that I have blown up and twisted around a bit, and there are quite a lot of exes of mine in there. They won’t be able to recognise themselves, I’ve really changed them.

“But I never felt like I should really root it to my own experience, because my own experience wasn’t funny enough.”

Perkins was in her late 20s when she came out to her own parents, and admits she was scared. “It’s not very fun, but it went pretty well. They just dealt with it pretty quickly and it was all cool,” she says.

“Maybe where the idea came from is my friend Sarah said, ‘look, you just get over it. If you don’t do it, I am going to tell them’. Maybe that stuck in my head and made me think, ‘Okay, all right, maybe I will write about this one day’.”

The challenge of coming out to her parents may be central to the plot, but Perkins absolutely doesn’t want people to see it as gay TV.

She says: “It’s a sitcom and it’s got a gay character in it. If there was something political behind it, it was just the fact that everyone is the same. I wanted it very firmly in the normal world, and to say, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if one day people didn’t have to go through that?’.

“And equally with the love story to ask – why label it? We all feel the same. We all feel pain at unrequited love, we all feel awkward when it’s a possibility, we all feel shy when push comes to shove.

“We don’t all undertake mild hypnosis and drum therapy with our netball rival to be able to navigate the rocky path to personal and romantic confidence, but that’s the joy of comedy for you.”