The dating game

Former EastEnders star Michelle Collins has been attending marriage guidance counselling. Nothing personal, you understand, it was research for ITV1's new series Single.

Each episode begins and ends with her character Sarah and her husband Paul, from whom she's separated, at a counselling session. "I went to Relate to do some research because I wanted to get it right," explains Collins.

"It brought back memories - the last time I was in Relate was with Ian Beale in EastEnders. I also know some Relate counsellors, one is an actress. They all have dual careers and different names to retain the anonymity.

"Paul is very immature at the sessions. He runs a children's party shop, which says a lot about him. He laughs his way through marriage guidance but Sarah takes it very seriously.

"She wants to know why they got together in the first place and make sense of the last 20 years. But she doesn't want to get back with Paul."

The series finds Collins as a fortysomething mother-of-two getting used to life after her marriage breaks up. "I think there is a lack of this kind of drama on TV," she says. "Cold Feet was hugely successful but I think people are frightened of writing about relationships and frightened of having gaps in the conversation. It's always got to be quick and fast dialogue."

She heads an ensemble cast as Sarah, who's been married for 20 years but is thrown back into the dating game when her marriage breaks down after her husband has an affair.

"She's stayed with him for so long because she loved him and they had kids," she says. "They grew up together and had kids very young. But people change and she just suddenly realises she doesn't quite like this man any more."

Collins herself has noticed the changes as she's grown older. Since finding fame as Cindy Beale in EastEnders, she's appeared in hit TV series such as Daylight Robbery and Two Thousand Acres Of Sky.

She hit 40 back in May and it doesn't seem to have done her confidence a lot of good. "Things haven't got better, they've got worse," she says, admitting she was terrified of attending the press launch of Single.

"Six years ago I would have thought it a walkover but now it's very hard. It's hard for anyone getting older, but also as a female it's all about how we look, the way we dress, how people perceive us and we have all these role models to look up to all the time.

"I've got to go down the gym, I've got to have that new outfit and sometimes it's quite hard chasing something when you're not quite sure what you're chasing. You want to be a good mother, a good partner and be great at everything but sometimes that's not possible."

Collins has little in common with her character. While Sarah has been married for 20 years, Collins has had a number of relationships throughout her adult life as well as spending a lot of the time single.

"What I do is quite a selfish job at the end of the day," she says. "I've been single a lot of the time because I was travelling around a lot and doing jobs here, there and everywhere.

"I was probably quite selfish in my relationships as well, in that I didn't particularly want to give up too much of what I was doing to be in a family. And to be in a relationship, you have to make sacrifices.

'"But sometimes it's quite healthy to be single for times in your life. Some people are just in relationships because they feel they have to be. I have been single for a lot of my life but I think I needed to be because of my job."

Her current boyfriend is cameraman John Beecham and she is a doting mother to seven-year-old Maia, her daughter from a previous relationship.

"I wasn't that hugely depressed about turning 40 really,'' she says. "There's that pressure that I want to look good because I want people to say, 'you don't look 40 do you?'.

"But I'm very lucky that I had my daughter quite late in my life and she keeps me young."

She plays mothers of her own age in the two programmes due on screen early next year. One is Sea Of Souls, a BBC paranormal series in which she plays a recovering alcoholic whose son starts talking fluent Spanish in the supermarket one day.

And she's just finished filming a screen version of Jacqueline Wilson's book, The Illustrated Mum. "I play a manic depressive mum who has red curled hair and is covered in tattoos," she says.

Collins is now looking at other offers of work. But one thing she's not sure she'd consider, if it was to be offered, is a Dirty Den-style return from the dead in EastEnders.

"I get asked that question all the time recently," she says. "People keep stopping me in the street and asking, 'well are you?'. You always say never and I think Leslie Grantham said never, didn't he?

"But Cindy did die in childbirth, so I don't know. They've not approached me yet so you never know."

* Single begins on ITV1 on Saturday at 9.30pm.

Published: 23/10/2003