In step and on song

Last Tango stars Anne Reid and Derek Jacobi are in complete harmony – both on and off screen

Pasada: a moment in the Argentine tango that provides an opportunity for the lady to add flourishes of her own, and where “a considerate leader will give her time to perform if she wishes”.

This perfectly describes the way Anne Reid MBE and Sir Derek Jacobi CBE interact in Last Tango in Halifax, which returns this week – thank you Sally Wainwright! Like their characters, Celia and Alan, in the much-loved series of late-blossoming love in Yorkshire, the actors are in tandem but with Reid often given the opportunity to lead. She is the more voluble, with great comic timing; he gently concurs, with sudden eruptions of laughter and ruminative digressions. They often finish each other’s sentences, like a real couple.

As we sit down to chat, I joke that since all the men in her family were journalists – including her father (Middle East correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, among other postings) and her three older brothers – it has probably left her with a healthy mistrust of other journalists. She fixes me with a look, as flinty as Celia gazing on Alan’s feckless farmer daughter Gillian, and says, “I don’t trust you as far as I could throw you.” Cue (slightly nervous) laughter from me.

At various times, Reid, who’s 84, says that she’s “blind as a bat” and “deaf as a post”, but there’s nothing reduced about her. On the contrary, her pretty eyes shine and her vivacity makes us all feel more animated. If Reid were to meet Celia in real life, would they be friends?

Reid laughs. “No, because she’s racist and homophobic. I mean, I’ve known people like Celia and you can take a friendship so far. You can have lunches with them, but if you scratch the surface…”

But you won’t say that you actually dislike her? “No, I can’t possibly, because I adore her. No, absolutely not. Sally would have a fit!” She pauses. “But there is a lot wrong with her.”

In the first episode of the new series, much to snobbish Celia’s chagrin, Alan goes for an interview at the local supermarket for a job on the till. And it’s here we’re introduced to a new character – a “mucky” little boy, with a brilliant vocabulary, who’s been stealing food. The storyline heralds one of the themes of the series: child poverty.

We talk about the rise in food banks and the number of people dropping below the poverty line. Both actors say they carry coins to give to the homeless. “It’s terrible and it never seems to get any better, does it?” says Reid. “I try to give money to people,” Jacobi adds very quietly, “and ask if they need anything.”

“I always carry money to give them, always,” Reid continues. “And it makes me think of my mother in Delhi in the 40s, who always went out with money and was advised against it – because then it would be like the Pied Piper, with thousands of children following you. It’s disgusting the way we haven’t sorted this world out. I have to say, it’s men. It’s not women. It’s men that have caused all the trouble.”

She hates it when people refute that by citing Margaret Thatcher. “Oh, come on – one woman. Everybody quotes her. Everybody. One woman. But it’s not women who fight in the street. How many stabbings in London have been done by women? How many?” She’s almost belligerent now. “How many women fight outside pubs and throw bricks through windows? I’m sorry, darling. If we’d got control of the planet 500 years ago, it would have been very different.”

Jacobi looks on meekly.

We make a brief foray into political correctness, following Laurence Fox’s statements on Newsnight and Alastair Stewart’s resignation from ITV News after misuse of social media. “It’s a minefield,” says Jacobi, who’s 81. “It’s very hard for my generation…”

“It’s ridiculous,” says Reid, before retreating into the safer territory of losing one’s marbles, another theme of the new series of Last Tango with the return of Alan’s brother Ted, played by Timothy West.

“I think about dementia,” Jacobi says dreamily, “because I’m getting old. Every time I forget somebody’s name or lose words. You just can’t find the words – ‘the flower’… it’s a f ***ing daisy! But I’ve forgotten the word. I do The Times crossword every day, just to make sure. It’s very helpful.”

Reid also swears like a trooper, she says. Do you use the F-word? “All the time.” Do you use the C-word? “Not in front of you, no.” Pause. “Only to very, very close friends.”

As for her mental capacity: “I’ve always been a bit vague,” she says. “But we work, so Derek and I are very lucky because we both have that facility to remember – well, he’s better than me. It must be dreadful if you can’t. And there are people a million times cleverer than me – no, I’m not putting myself down! – who can’t remember their simple lines.”

Reid is self-deprecating to a fault. I comment that she’s always saying how fat and ugly she is, that she’s inelegant and just a jobbing actor (emphatically untrue on all counts). It’s quite difficult to pay her a compliment. For instance, tell her how great she was as the matriarch Muriel Deacon in Russell T Davies’s dystopian tour de force Years and Years, and she sniffs: “Oh thank you, but it wasn’t too much of a stretch, darling. I mean, it’s a northern grandmother, you know, it wasn’t like playing Lear or Hamlet.”

The two of them talk about their nightly gin and tonics at the hotel, followed by dinner – where they talk about everything other than Last Tango – and I wonder if they ever get bored with one another. Obviously, they both say no, smartly. Then Reid adds, “I don’t, but I probably bore him to death.”

“No, no, now that was putting yourself down! Naughty!” Jacobi taps Reid on her arm.

This prompts Reid to reveal, “Oh darling, it’s all a terrible conceit! It’s so people will say, ‘No! You’re not really like that – you’re wonderful.’” At which Jacobi throws back his head and howls with laughter. “And let’s get one thing straight,” she continues, “I am not insecure, am I?” Jacobi has talked about how delighted he was to be cast as Alan, so that people could see him “as common as muck and an ordinary Joe” and could forget all his “posh” roles and the Shakespearean greats.

Jacobi has been with his partner, fellow actor and theatre director Richard Clifford, for 30 years but he was born in Leytonstone in east London, a war baby and only child who didn’t see much of his father, Arthur, until he was seven. He was evacuated for 18 months to a village that was only two miles from the secret code breaking centre at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire – which is satisfyingly circular because he ended up playing codebreaker Alan Turing on stage in the 1986 play Breaking the Code. “You might have passed him on your bicycle,” says Reid.

Later, when Jacobi’s mother, Daisy, was out at work, he would go to his Auntie Hilda’s for lunch. His grandparents lived above his aunt, all within walking distance of his parents’ house, so everyday he would see all his family. Reid says, “You always felt loved, didn’t you?” Jacobi concurs. “Always.”

When he was nine and a half, he got rheumatic fever, had his legs encased and was confined to bed for nearly two years. “I became very good at crosswords, extremely good at embroidery and of course I listened to the radio 24/7,” he says. “I’m sure it permeated.”

At his grammar school, Leyton County High School for Boys, the fledgeling actor was in plays and read the lesson in the morning assembly. It was the Teddy boy era and he had the full look: drape jacket, beetle-crusher shoes, a little jabot and a quiff. “Because I sounded posh and was in the school plays, the other boys sent me up and called me a poof. But when I was on my own, they’d sidle up to me and go, ‘Ere, wherdyou get yer ’air done?’ They rather admired it, you know.”

At Cambridge, where he read history and his contemporaries were Ian Mckellen and Trevor Nunn, he was given some voice lessons by a fellow girl student. It still makes him emotional to recall being left at the university by his parents. He was just 19, surrounded by 21-year olds who had done their national service. “I’d never been away from home and I was suddenly on my own and having to be responsible. My parents left me there, and we were all crying – even though it was only 50 miles away.”

Reid was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, and her father insisted she had elocution lessons, because “I had a very strong north-eastern accent, like Newcastle mixed with maybe Middlesbrough, really ’orrible.”

Her late husband, Peter Eckersley, head of drama at Granada (the two met when she was in Coronation Street, where he was a writer and producer), died in 1981 when their son, Mark, was nine. Now 48, Mark is a film editor on series such as The Crown, Black Mirror and Peaky Blinders and his wife Sarah works for the BBC.

“I adore her,” says Reid. “We have so much in common.” Which gets her onto the subject of other people’s children: “To me, other people’s children are… [she shrugs]. I can’t be bothered with a lot of them. But my child and my grandchildren, there’s nobody in the world like them.”

Reid would have done musical theatre if she could roll back time and go to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama rather than Rada. She has performed a one-woman cabaret act in London, and last year she and Jacobi did a West End show together at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in which she interviewed her fellow actor about his career. “We were rather good, weren’t we?” she says. “Abbott and Costello…” (They’ll be doing the show again next month at The Lowry in Manchester.)

They also recorded an album, called You Are the Best Thing… That Ever Has Happened to Me, named after a Stephen Sondheim tune included on it. They break into another number together – “I may be wrong, but I think you’re wonderful…” – sweetly looking at one another as they sway and sing. The Sydney Opera House had offered them a show this January. “But my friend,” says Reid, giving Jacobi a look, “was in India living it up at the Taj Mahal. That would have been nice.”

Last Tango is popular all over the world. Diane Keaton wants to make an American version, and when Reid was in Tasmania researching a convict ancestor for Who Do You Think You Are? shown last year people were constantly calling, “Celia! It’s Celia!” [She renders this in broad Strine.] The two offer an intriguing insight into the way Sally Wainwright handles her Last Tango scripts, giving detailed stage directions. “She kind of writes motivation into the pages,” says Jacobi. Reid agrees. “She sort of directs it, doesn’t she? It’s uncommon for writers to do that. Some of them don’t write anything at all. Some of them write total drivel and you think, ‘What’s all this about?’”

Would it appeal to either of them to be in a Mike Leigh film, with his famously improvisational approach? “It was talked about at one point,” Reid says. “But I couldn’t spend months improvising something and then find I’ve got four lines. He said that doesn’t happen, but I know somebody it did happen to and, frankly, I haven’t got enough time left in my life to give months and months. I want to know what I’m doing. We’re both the same like that, aren’t we, Derek? We like a script, we like to work on it and maybe just a little bit of improvising – although we didn’t do any in this [Last Tango] at all.” Jacobi says, “No, I’m not keen on improvising.” Reid laughs. “Look if I’m going to play the lead, I don’t mind!”

Talking of which, there are some leading roles she would have loved to have had a crack at. “I would have liked to have played – don’t laugh – Cleopatra. No, I wouldn’t really.” Peals of laughter. “But I’d definitely have liked to have played Hedda Gabler. I think I might be the best Hedda Gabler you’ve never seen. Maybe they could produce an older version with me?”

Radio Times