Comedy star Caroline Quentin tells Steve Pratt she plans to go back to being a mother-of-two after back-to-back filming of Life Begins, four Blue Murder films and a one-off comedy about a woman obsessed with The Sound of Music.

MEN Behaving Badly star Caroline Quentin says that motherhood is fine, but admits that being a working mum with two small children is proving harder than she thought. "I was doing really well, then William came," says the actress, who stars in Life Begins, the new series from Cold Feet writer Mike Bullen.

"He has teeth and everything now. It has been quite difficult not sleeping at night and then getting up horribly early, and the baby is sleeping as you go to work.

"It's been quite tricky, and I miss the children a lot when I'm away filming. Emily is in school and can't travel much, but they do come up to see me quite a lot." Since filming Life Begins, in which she plays a mother-of-two whose husband (played by Alexander Armstrong) suddenly leaves her, Quentin has begun shooting four 90-minutes films in the Blue Murder detective series. She made the pilot episode while she was pregnant.

After that, she's committed to Trapped, a one-off comedy by Gimme Gimme Gimme writer Jonathan Harvey in which she plays a woman obsessed by the show The Sound Of Music. "It's a wild, broad comedy," she says.

All of which makes juggling home life and work exacting, but she doesn't think her children are suffering. "Emily's fantastic. I hear a lot of children torture their parents for going away. She's really glad to see the back of me," she says. "She's very good and says she knows I'm going to work. Someone at school told her what I did for a living. 'You're an actress,' she said the other day.

"It has been harder than I thought it would be. When you have one baby, you can take it around with you, but with two it's much harder. I thought it would fall into place, but it's the physical thing of being away from your children."

Work is a lower priority, but Quentin says she's lucky to be able to manage the two things. "I have some switch in my head saying, 'I'm at work now' once I start the working day. At lunchtime, I'm on the telephone to the family again," she says.

After filming Trapped, she plans to take four or five months off work from the end of April to do "mum things".

By now Quentin is on a roll with her stories about her children. "Shall I shut up?," she asks, then decides to tell one more tale about Emily, who's four-and-a-half, coming home from school recently and saying, "We have to learn the bloody Beatles song."

Quentin was none too happy about the language she'd seemingly picked up at school. Then Emily started singing the song, "Oo-bloody, oo-bladda..."

She likes her Life Begins character Maggie, who doesn't realise anything's wrong in her marriage until her husband announces unexpectedly that he's unhappy and wants to move out. Maggie is left to rebuild her own life, while bringing up two children and dealing with elderly parents, one of whom has Alzheimer's.

As this is Mike Bullen's first series since the fantastically-successful Cold Feet, expectations are high. That doesn't worry Quentin. She sees it as a positive thing. "If people really like the last thing he wrote, they might give us a chance," she says.

"I don't see the downside, although it might blow up in my face. Mike has touched a nerve with Cold Feet and people say they like his writing. Hopefully it will bring people to our show.

"Without kissing Mike's arse, it's so well written you don't have to do anything but play it. It sounds so crappy when you say that, but it's terribly delicate the way it was written. You have to play the reality of the situations, like the mother and daughter relationship. They love each other and drive each other insane.

"I hope people will stick with the show and get the jokes too. It's darker at the beginning than the end."

Both she and Armstrong come from comedy backgrounds, but there was no sense of restraining their natural inclination to make people laugh.

Again that was down to Bullen's script. "On the set there was quite a lot of stupid laughing going on but we were quite disciplined. You kind of trust the writing and it sort of plays itself if you trust it," she says.

Maggie isn't always sympathetic and good-tempered, one reason why the actress loves the character. That's particularly apparent in the abrasive relationship with her mother (played by Anne Read). "They are really awful to each other in times of crisis," says Quentin. "She's really pissed off at me for deserting her. It's a really interesting aspect of the script. It's fascinating, very moving and very funny as well."

Her busy schedule might make a reunion with her Men Behaving Badly stars difficult, if the idea ever gets off the ground. "It was mooted before when I was going to do Life Begins," she says. "I couldn't have done it because I was already committed to that and Blue Murder," she says.

"In principle, I'm willing to do it if I could fit it in, I haven't heard anything about doing one. But I'm so flat out it would be hard to find time with the children and everything else."

* Life Begins: Monday, ITV1, 9pm.

Published: 12/02/2004