Russell Tovey interview

Former History Boy is also the man who might have been Tintin but what he really wants is 'the career of Julie Walters. As a man'.

Portrait of the artist: Julie Walters, actor

'The worst thing anyone ever wrote? "Julie Walters obviously thinks she's got good legs." That was painful'.

Julie Walters on first meeting with Victoria Wood

Julie Walters recalls the inauspicious occasion that she first worked with Victoria Wood in a show called In at the Death at the Bush Theatre in west London.

A repeat of Wood's most glorious festive special from Christmas Day 2000. Because that's where she belongs, on Christmas Day. This wondrous show includes a timely finale featuring a singing/dancing Ann Widdecombe. How things change. Many standout moments, but the ER spoof set in a WI meeting, Julie Walters repeatedly falling into a grandfather clock in A Christmas Carol and a heavenly Brief Encounter spoof are stand-outs. Plus the "backstage" antics of some hapless BBC executives prove all too prescient. Worship Wood.

Julie Walters: 'Parts for women disappear as you age'

Julie Walters on ageism, sexism in television and mistaking her dog for a wig.

Victoria Wood's Midlife Christmas (BBC1, Thursday), nine years in the coming and worth the wait, was just as good as Morecambe and Wise. Every sketch was polished till it shone, right down to the big finish, a Busby Berkeley production number where bespectacled blokes in beige woollies and their wives in underwired undies danced exhilaratingly to Let's Do It.

In an extended sketch, Bo Beaumont (Julie Walters), an actress whose career had been all downhill since she appeared as Mrs Overall in a low-budget soap, and her dowdy, devoted assistant, Wendy (Victoria Wood), went through a series of disastrous TV auditions from I Am a Celebrity (based on a Japanese endurance game) to Dancing On Ice with Torvill and Dean (memorable for Julie Walters extraordinary legs, collapsible as sugar tongs). We left them at home enjoying When Gastric Bands Wear Out.

Another sketch, Lark Pies to Cranchesterfield, the sepia-tinted tale of a poor flitcher and his daughter, Araminty, who left home to better herself in the post office ("Our Araminty's going to 'ave 'er 'air straightened!") caught programmes like Cranford and Victorian Farm Christmas full in the small of the back. Much as the Manchester express caught Bessie ("Cow on the line!") as she grazed unaware on the railway track in Cranford.

Victoria Wood, God bless her, had a crack at Lark Rise to Candleford in her Christmas Eve special, Victoria Wood's Midlife Christmas, packaged and presented as a kindly gift to middle-aged couch potatoes. The target was a whale in a barrel, frankly, but there were still some fine jokes, including the scene in which Cranchesterford's teenagers exchanged embroidery text messages, stitching like fury and then handing the frame over to a nearby urchin to deliver. There were also some terrible jokes, though knowingly and lovingly handcrafted to be terrible, so that it didn't matter. Given its content, the line "I could have been a corn tender", uttered by the family paterfamilias when he wistfully recalled his unfulfilled ambition to go into the seed trade, was surely an unbeatable candidate for corniest gag of the Christmas break. Julie Walters was on good form too as Bo Beaumont, fruitlessly struggling to build public presence after years of playing Mrs Overall in Acorn Antiques. She walked out of Strictly Come Dancing because she couldn't master the three-step warm-up Anton du Beke tried to teach her, was passed over for a new Delia series because her signature dish - crackermole, a sardine on a Tuc cracker - didn't appeal, and pulled out of Who Do You Think You Are? when it becomes clear that she was going to have to reveal her true name and date of birth.

Even devotees of BBC1's cute historical drama Lark Rise to Candleford would admit that it's deliciously spoofworthy, what with its myriad of quaint Victorian niceties and arch dialogue. So it will surprise no one that the masterly Victoria Wood presents Lark Pies to Cranchesterford as part of her much-anticipated Christmas special, telling the touching story of young Araminty, who leaves her rural hamlet for a job in the Post and Potato Office.

Midlife Christmas promises to be a real treat for anyone who thinks Wood has been away from television for too long. Yes, she did Housewife 49 (very successfully), but that was a drama and Wood is queen of the sharp, pitch-perfect sketch show.

Here she looks stern as Sir Alan Sugar's sidekick Margaret Mountford in an Apprentice send-up, and we revisit Bo Beaumont (Julie Walters), the pretentious actress who plays Mrs Overall in Acorn Antiques. Guests include Delia Smith, Torvill and Dean, Anton du Beke and Reece Shearsmith.

In her first Christmas special since 2000, Wood presents a sketch compendium dedicated to the vagaries of middle age. There is an episode of Lark Pies to Cranchesterford and the return of Julie Walters as delusional soap duchess Bo Beaumont. The one-liners crackle but there's an air of exhaustion to the proceedings, with skits on txt spk and the menopause so quarter-baked you start to wonder whether it might be time to reassess Wood's hitherto incontestable Grade II-listed status. But then along comes Walters with another joke about biscuits and, phew, everything goes national treasure-shaped again. In a nutshell: lumpy.