Sarah Smart Fan

JANE HALL star Sarah Smart is hoping her pole dancing skills can help her find her a new fella.

Sexy Sarah, 29, who plays hapless bus driver Jane in the ITV1 drama, reckons she can lure a man by using the pole she keeps in the kitchen of her north London home.

At the moment she shares it with dog Tootsie but believes the pole - which she kept after taking lessons for BBC drama Funland last year - might now be the key to snaring a guy.

The At Home With The Braithwaites star told us: "I’ve been single for a year after being in a relationship for six years. That fizzled out, as I was too busy with work.

"I liked being in love and I miss being in love but I am quite selfish and do like my independence.

"If I got a guy home I’d give him a demonstration on the pole as I have picked up a few moves.

"I used to practice in my kitchen and my mate Sarah Churm who played my sister in Braithwaites would film it for me on her mobile phone."

She added: "The only downside is that I got pole burns on the middle of my thighs from practising too much."

It's all a far cry from her role as the accident-prone Jane Hall in the ITV1 six-parter screened on Wednesdays at 9pm.

But it could well appeal to her wicked alter-ego Fantasy Jane who sports leather catsuits and other sexy outfits in the series.

She said: "My parents will love Jane Hall and my granny will be pleased that I keep my clothes on after Funland. My dad left the room when my sex scenes came on pretending there was a draught!

"Jane is a great part but I was sad I didn’t actually get to learn to drive a bus. I thought I’d have to pass my PSV licence but I only drove the bus a few feet forwards and backwards for scenes.

"It was a shame as I'd passed my test for At Home With The Braithwaites as I had to drive a Lotus Elite in the show."

In the latest episode, Jane is torn between two men - fickle Richard (Daniel Lapaine) who likes to play the field and the serious Robert (Stephen Mangan).

Meanwhile there is a roasting in store for a few characters when Jane’s love cheat bus driver pal Mandy (Gillian Taylforth) holds a barbecue.

Up next for Sarah is a Casualty-style BBC1 drama set in 1906. She told us: "I play Nurse Ada Russell and it’s about her romance with surgeon Sir James Walton played by Tom Riley.

"It’s the true story of the Royal London Hospital and about people who really worked there. All the nurses were well-educated and upper-class but their patients were beggars and prostitutes."

Credit: The Sun

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7/20/2006 • Sarah Smart, Sarah Smart News Articles • 0 comments

It's been a long and bumpy ride on the buses for actress Sarah Smart.

Two years after filming, Jane Hall (ITV1, tonight, 9pm) finally reaches its intended destination - our TV screens. After such a long wait, it's a wonder two episodes haven't come along at once.

The six-part series, mainly filmed in Manchester, tells the story of the twentysomething girl, played by Sarah, who sets off on a life-changing journey from Huddersfield to Hounslow and finds herself signing up to drive double-decker buses.

On the overnight bus to the capital, Jane is accompanied by her more confident alter-ego - Fantasy Jane - who regularly pops out to pass comment or act out an imaginary scene.

Last seen in Funland, At Home With The Braithwaites star Sarah enjoyed her double role aboard the double-decker. "I think I should be getting paid twice for it. It's good fun because I get to play two complete opposites - ordinary Jane and sparky Fantasy Jane.

"It can be hard technically as they are always in the same scenes at the same time. So I have to walk in as plain Jane, before re-shooting as Fantasy Jane."

Taylforth

Sarah and co-star Gillian Taylforth, who plays Mandy, trained to drive their buses in west London but actually shot most of their scenes in Manchester, with streets transformed to make them look like London.

"I really admire bus drivers now," says Sarah. "I would not want to be responsible for all those people's lives - I think it is a bit scary and daunting. But I did get a sense of power behind the wheel."

The drama is by former Coronation Street and Braithwaites writer Sally Wainwright, who was born in Huddersfield and once spent 18 months working as a London bus driver. "It was an absurd situation for me to be in as I was a na've, shy, middle class graduate from the north in an urban, working class, male environment," recalls Sally.

"I took the daily vitriolic insults from members of the public personally, whereas for most of the other drivers it was water off a duck's back. If anything bad, dangerous or downright embarrassing was going to happen on a double decker, it would have happened on mine.

"A lot of the series is based on what really happened to me. It was a time in my life when I just needed to find a job in London as I wanted to be a writer. But I knew that I had to do something to pay the rent - so I became a London bus driver.

"I'm proud of it in retrospect. I learned a lot about life and how to deal with people, and I did actually like driving the buses, swinging them round. You can control traffic by driving well. What I hated was the passengers, their attitude and the abuse you got everyday, for not even doing something wrong."

So how did the series come about? "During a tipsy evening with my script editor Noelle Morris, I told her that I used to be a bus driver. She thought it was the most hysterical thing, and I really should write a series about it. By the end of the evening we had come up with a six-part series and I wrote the first script in about four weeks. In a sense it had been in my head for 15 years.

Cul-de-sac

"One thing that did happen that I've included in Jane Hall is getting my bus stuck down a cul-de-sac. I managed to get out - after a 27 point turn.

"After 18 months on the buses, I got the offer to write a trial script for The Archers. I was 25, really happy to be writing The Archers and definitely ready to chuck the bus driving in."

Executive producer Nicola Shindler, head of Manchester's Red Production Company, says: "Sally has a unique talent for mixing funny dialogue and stories with really quite horrific incidents and showing the darkness that is there in most people.

"I was a huge fan of the Braithwaites and I loved the idea of a female bus driver - something I honestly dreamed of doing when I used to get the bus to school - and from the very beginning Sally's ideas about how to tell this story were original, funny and engaging."

Gillian Taylforth missed her two children when filming in Manchester. "It is difficult sometimes and being away is tough. I am a home bird. So while I was in Manchester I was on the phone to the kids continually - in the mornings, before they go to school, and when they got back and then in the evenings. That way they know that I am always there."
by Ian Wylie

Credit: Manchester Evening News

It's not every young actress who has a TV series specially written for her. But that's what happened to Sarah Smart. She talks to Bernadette McNulty

'It's a bit posh in here, isn't it?" When Sarah Smart arrives at the austere London café I have chosen for our meeting, there seems something very familiar about her. Maybe it was all those years in the hugely popular At Home with the Braithwaites as the stroppy lesbian daughter Virginia. Or her stand-out role this year in BBC2's Funland as the lap-dancing, gun-toting Lola. Or maybe it is just those looks - now pretty, now ugly, now innocent, now wanton - that can play that clever trick of looking like everyone and nobody you know.

But bizarrely, I do know her. Rather than the Northern lass you might assume her to be from most of her roles, it turns out that Sarah comes from Birmingham and went to the same primary and secondary schools as me. "I've never had a role with a Brummie accent," she says. "People still have all these horrible prejudices against it. They think you sound stupid." It is not hard to still see the impish, dark-haired girl with the pudding-bowl haircut, giggling sweetly in her navy-blue uniform. She has hardly changed at all.

So it is hard to reconcile the petite 29-year-old in front of me with the chameleon-like actress and leading star of ITV's new drama Jane Hall, written especially for her by the Braithwaites writer, Sally Wainwright. Smart plays a young Northern woman, Jane, who moves to London, becomes a bus driver and gets involved in various tangles in her love life and in the bear pit of the garage.

In typical Wainwright style, though, this is no straightforward drama. While the ribaldry of the garage has echoes of the popular 1970s comedy On the Buses - reinforced by Jane's Olive-style glasses and naive misdemeanours - there are heavy slices of dark realism and high camp. So Smart doesn't just play the plain Jane, she also plays her alter-ego fantasy Jane, who pops up to taunt herself at moments of high tension.

"I look quite sweet, but when I get angry my mum says about eight different characters come out of me," says Smart. "Maybe it's the Catholic thing, where you learn to repress things, so you have this darkness inside."

On top of this, a cast that includes the unlikely combination of Geraldine James, Gillian Taylforth and Green Wing's Stephen Mangan meant it took ITV two years to work out what to do with this odd mix. "It was difficult for them to categorise," says Smart. "It starts off as a family drama, but then turns into something much more difficult and serious. But that is the kind of television I love."

Jane Hall also saved Smart from giving up on acting. The eldest of four children from a close Irish-Italian family, Smart had her first TV part aged 10 and landed role after role until she was 24, when her career suddenly stalled.

"I ended up being out of work for a year," she says. "Up until then, I had this love affair with acting because I had such an easy time and I never thought it would let me down. So it was a real shock to not have any work. I spent a lot of time crying and waiting for the phone to ring."

Luckily, the phone call from Sally Wainwright arrived and her luck returned. After filming Jane Hall, she changed gear for her much edgier role in Funland. "I was trying to do something more serious and challenging, and I loved the quirkiness of the script," says Smart. "It was a bit embarrassing doing the lap-dancing, but I quite enjoyed it in the end. I'm not that self-conscious about my looks and I think that's important in acting."

Funland has attracted Hollywood film offers, too. "Coming from television, it is really hard to get into film because there is a snobbery," she says. "Film directors don't watch television, they go to the theatre. I didn't go to drama school and I haven't got family connections. But Funland was very cinematic, so people can see me do those things."

Smart is proud of her small-screen success, though. "I love television and I learnt so much more watching actors work on set," she says. "I think I have a thicker skin and I can bring more life experiences than someone who went to drama school. Nobody was an actress where I was from, but my background allows me to connect with people."

Her success even inspired her mother to take up writing and she is now a scriptwriter on the daytime soap Doctors. "If the work dries up again, I'll get her to write me a film," she laughs.

After the interview, Smart is off home to Birmingham to see her family and friends for the weekend. It is hard to imagine someone so unstarry, someone who is so happy to be the girl next door, enjoying the relentless attention fame would bring.

"I am scared, but I want to do interesting work and earn good money, so you have to play the fame game," she says. "I'm not materialistic, I just want to be able to take care of my family and pick the roles I want to play. I want to have choices."

After professing a love for David Tennant, it seems a shame that one of those choices won't be the assistant's role in Doctor Who. "I'd love to be in Doctor Who," says Smart. "Anything to get next to David. Even if I had to dress up as an alien."

Credit:Telegraph Online

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7/13/2006 • Sarah Smart, Sarah Smart News Articles • 0 comments