Kate Peers is serious about comedy Dead Funny but jokes about her links with TV's The Simpsons.

STARRING in a play called Dead Funny shouldn't cause you any concerns about keeping a straight face, but actress Kerry Peers has exactly that problem as glowering wife Eleanor. While the rest of the cast revel in impersonations of Benny Hill, Frankie Howerd, Morecambe and Wise and Jimmy James, her role as a desperate-to-be-pregnant woman means she has to hate her husband's involvement in the Dead Funny Society - dedicated to Britain's fallen heroes of light entertainment.

Billingham Forum Theatre hosts Terry Johnson's award-winning comedy from Monday until Saturday and much rests on Stephen Pinder, who plays Eleanor's husband, Richard, Ben Hull and Robin Askwith to provide the fondly-remembered punchlines.

Kerry says: "I 'm supposed to watch it disdainfully but in rehearsals I found it very hard to keep a straight face and I think the boy's impersonations are absolutely fantastic. I think they're brilliant. I don't think they are necessarily going for direct impersonations, more the flavour of it, but they do get them down really well and make the sketches very funny.

"Although it only takes up a small proportion of the play it is one of the main things that the audience come out remembering."

The death of Benny Hill prompts the main events of Dead Funny with Askwith's character, the closet gay Brian, deciding to throw a party.

Kerry admits that she signed up for Dead Funny once she learned that director Nikolai Foster was in charge. "I'd worked with him before on A Streetcar Named Desire and I got an amazing opportunity to play Blanche, a dream part, and he was a young director then but I found working with him on that was the most incredible theatrical experience I'd had. So when he offered the part I just said 'yes' and made a show of reading the script first. If he'd said 'would you like to play Bill And Ben and be Weed?' I'd have said yes."

She did worry that Eleanor's cold and hard nature was too baffling and couldn't see what purpose it served but reveals that during the second reading the play's humour and her character's witty nature began to shine through.

"I began to see her dilemma of being so absolutely desperate for a child and with a husband who won't have sex with her," she says. Another clever piece of casting has her ex-Brookside co-star Steven Pinder playing hapless husband Richard, who ends up naked on stage.

"I think when you've got those tricky scenes of him having to take his clothes off it really helps if you get on well and allows you to play those nasty tensions to the hilt without worry," Kerry explains. She was Helen Carey in Brookside while Pinder became well-known as the troubled Max Farnham.

"We met on the set and it was nice seeing a familiar face," she explains.

She has to confess she had little idea of Robin Askwith's Confessions Of.. fame until her partner explained the actor's womanising claim to fame.

"He was so excited because he'd seen all the Confessions movies and If and thought it was fantastic. Robin was thrilled as well when I told him, whereas I didn't know who he was because I'm a few years younger than my partner and missed those films. I didn't have that Jack-the-lad image so when he started playing Brian I just accepted what he did and it's a very touching part which moves me most."

Kerry is best known for ITV1's The Bill, where she played WDC Suzi Croft for five years from 1993.

"It was great time, we had 17m viewers plus in those days so it was huge then and I don't think I quite realised at the time how watched it was. Of course you had fewer channels then and it was great to be part of it," she says.

Although Kerry says she rarely watches TV these days she does have a strange TV claim to fame. According to internet information site Wikipedia, her voice has appeared on world-wide favourite The Simpsons.

"Isn't that fantastic. My daughter Natalie came through and said 'you've done an episode of The Simpsons' and as we're all huge fans in this house we were delighted. Of course, actually I've never done anything. I might put it on my cv anyway because the piece is there on the internet. It would have been the highlight of my career... maybe they're about to ask me," she giggles.