Brigit Forsyth is still best known as Thelma in the Likely Lads, a TV hit 35 years ago. A more current role finds her playing the cello, she tells Steve Pratt.

A CELLO leans against the wall of the rehearsal room. The instrument is playing a key role in the life of actress Brigit Forsyth at the moment as she prepares for a world premiere on the York stage.

Yet it's another role, bossy Thelma in Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads, for which most people remember her. The fact that it all happened 35 years ago - yes, that long - and that only two series of 13 episodes, one film and a Christmas special were made does nothing to diminish her association with the comedy.

Yet we're unlikely to be treated to an updating of Terry, Bob and Thelma as writers, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais have done with Auf Wiedersehen Pet. "You know about Jimmy?" she asks when inquiries are made about the possibility of a Likely Lads revival. She means James Bolam, the Sunderland-born actor who played Terry and won't even talk about the series, let along recreate the role.

She thinks that his attitude is a "bit silly", considering he's gone on to do so many other things for which he's also remembered. "I don't see why it's such a big deal," she says. "It was a good programme with good scripts. It's not like you're being remembered for a bad series. It's nice to be remembered at all."

The repeats have certainly kept her in the public eye. "I'm amazed how many people still know me from the Likely Lads. Young people love it," she says.

"Everyone thinks we did 25 series. I just remember that it was great fun doing comedy. I'd been doing heavy TV. It didn't have an impact for me straight away, not until 20 years later when they did an Omnibus programme on Dick and Ian.

"I was interviewed for that. I thought, 'it's a boys' show and there'll be little mention of Thelma'. They were so lovely about me in the programme. I got non-stop telly for a year after that. It was an extraordinary effect, that one thing like that can catapult you back into the public eye."

She hopes for similar success for The Cello And The Nightingale, the new play about internationally-acclaimed cellist Beatrice Harrison being premiered at York Theatre Royal.

This doesn't seem an obvious choice for a play, which probably accounts for the chequered history of the piece, written by Patricia Cleveland Peck.

Harrison was famous for her "duet" with wild nightingales in her Surrey garden, an event recorded in the BBC's first outside broadcast of bird song. This year marks the 80th anniversary of the concert, which Forsyth recalls her mother talking about.

The play dates back to when Forsyth's cello teacher suggested she read Peck's biography of Harrison and should do a piece about the famous cellist as they both played the instrument.

"I wasn't really interested. Then, just for fun, when I was being interviewed by the Radio Times a couple of years ago, and was asked about my next project, I said I'd like to do something about Beatrice Harrision because I play the cello," she says.

The result was "quite extraordinary". Along with letters from nightingale enthusiasts and eccentrics was one from Peck. She had lived in a cottage on the Harrison estate, had known the sisters, and possessed pictures, letters and dresses of Beatrice's.

"We had a meeting and I said I didn't want to do a one-woman show, I like working with other people. So she wrote a play for two - Beatrice and a psychiatrist, which is an old idea but a good way of telling a story," she says.

"There was something there and I liked the play. It then started its chequered history of being rejected. People kept being terribly enthusiastic and then they were not. I wasn't particularly bothered because I had lots of other work. I never thought, to be honest, it would get done but it was making me practise the cello."

She was spotted with her cello, while rehearsing the role of Gertrude in Hamlet at West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, by voice coach Susan Stern - who is now directing The Cello And The Nightingale in the Studio at York Theatre Royal.

Forsyth assumes her agent sent the play to the York management, who've had it re-written into a four-hander. The shrink has gone, Harrison's sisters have appeared.

Along the way to the rehearsal room, "extraordinary things have happened", says the actress. She was invited to a music shop in Cardiff to play one of Harrison's cellos, and to be photographed wearing one of her frocks. "It was like getting hold of a Ferrari. It was just thrilling," she says of playing Harrison's cello.

While touring in Humble Boy last year, she took her own cello to the same shop for repairs - and ended up buying her current instrument, which she'll play in York.

The whole Harrison thing has re-ignited her interest in the cello. Forsyth came from a musical family, who all sang and played instruments. She played the cello from nine, abandoning it once she went to drama school.

"I thought the cello was frightfully boring. Then my aunt died and left me her cello, which was quite posh and I was rather excited.

"Then I devised a show with another actor to stop me going mad with a TV series. It got me back on stage, because I had my children and didn't do theatre for seven years, and I played the cello in the show."

Brigit's not only playing but also composing now. She'll be pleased if the play has a life outside York, but whatever happens, she is determined to make a CD of her cello work, even if she has to finance it herself.

* The Cello And The Nightingale: The Studio, York Theatre Royal, May 14 to June 5. Tickets 01904 623568.