Leah Brotherhead plays Toni in Hullraisers. She's closely connected to the setting of the show, having grown up in Hull herself.

Why were you attracted to this role?

The scripts were amazing from the get-go. There were bits of improvisation and stuff like that, which was great.

Is that quite unusual in TV?

I had an amazing time playing a lead in Zomboat! which was an ITV comedy and [director] Adam Miller was always up for us playing around with the jokes. Before then I was always a day-player or I'd come in and do a week or whatever and a lot of the time you turn up and take up as little space as you can and try your best to get the job done well! So yes, Hullraisers has been a new experience for me.

What were your reference points when you were assembling the character of Toni?

I grew up in Hull so I already had a lot of ideas for her. I still know lots of people that live in Hull and there were definitely some people that I looked to for inspiration, like a couple of sisters who live really close to each other and their parents live in a nearby street and they're a tight-knit family.

I think when we were young it felt like maybe it was a failure if you stayed in your hometown. Like there's a stigma about it. But now I can see that you can afford a really nice house (particularly in Hull), afford to have a family and have more of a connection with a place. Some of my best friends are back in Hull and absolutely love their lives. So I thought a lot about that when I was working out who Toni was and why she made the choices she made in her life. I think perhaps Toni sometimes still gets caught up in the idea of being a 'failure'.

What's Hull like?

Hull has such a strong identity but I think it also can be a forgotten city. It is the end-of-the-line: the train literally stops at Hull - the next stop would be Amsterdam.

Growing up I was always used to Hull being the butt of the joke. It was constantly being voted worst city in the UK. I remember there would always be a joke about Hull being rubbish in comedies I liked, such as Blackadder.

Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer named it 'worst place to live'. There was a storyline in Eastenders about Kat and Alfie being forced to move to Hull to get a council house but 'luckily she was saved from such a fate' at the last minute. You become very protective - I'm allowed to slag it off because I'm from there - no one else is!

The population of Hull would never abandon it, they would fight to the death haha. I had a great time growing up in Hull. It's always been a really creative city with a lot of history and character. I was in a band and the music scene was always really vibrant. The drinks are cheap and there are lots of independent restaurants. There's real regeneration in the city. Humber Street, which has all the old warehouses, has become theatre spaces, art galleries and clubs. There's a lot of stuff happening! So it feels brilliant to be in a show that celebrates Hull.

What's the dynamic between the three women?

Rana and Paula love their lives. Paula is queen of her castle and Rana is climbing up the ranks of the police world and is quite content with being single. Toni is the one who is still trying to work out what she wants her life to be. Sometimes, maybe, she doesn't take the time to look around her and recognise what she has. I think that's what makes this fresh and sets it apart.

These three northern women are battling away with life in a way that something like Drifters might have done before but our characters are a bit older, we're in our 30s, early 40s, and we still haven't got it together. As a woman in my 30s that really resonates with me because I think we're all socially conditioned to feel like everything should be sorted by that age. We should have sorted out our career, our family, our relationships, where we want to live, we should own a house. But actually, most of us have not got all of that s**t sorted for a plethora of reasons. I think Toni hasn't realised that everyone is screaming into their pillow at night about something!

Toni seems to have a sense that the best years are behind her. Does that resonate with you too?

I do understand that feeling of, "I can't make those brave choices any more". If you're like Toni and you've got a kid in school you might feel more nailed to where you live and you can't do as you please any more. But I also think Toni's a bit of a "shoulda woulda coulda". I'm not sure she'd ever have been brave enough to go to London and audition for drama schools and leave that safety net of Paula and Rana so she hasn't got anything to regret in a way.

She's the sort of person who'd go out with them and say, "I'm not going to hang out with Paula and Rana all night, I'm going to make new friends", and you just know she'd end up in the corner with them all night. She'd have the best time, but she wouldn't go off and make new friends.

What's her home set-up?

What's really nice about her relationship with Craig is that it's not a dead in the water relationship. It's not like, "Oh, we've had a kid and now we're stuck together." I think there is real love. They're a real team and they make each other laugh, and there's desire in that relationship. Having a kid just made things more complicated. They're not very good at juggling their time and they're having teething problems. Toni's definitely not the mum who organises the bake sales but she tries to be. I think she should just let that go, but she can't! She wants to be everything.

Is Craig a calming influence on her?

He used to be in a band and they definitely had wild nights out and stuff, but Toni is still spontaneous and joyful whereas Craig is naturally more content and more like, "We have a nice life and a lovely daughter, what's wrong with you?" Craig's a bit more like Paula. He's got his five-a-side football team, he likes working at the school, he's found his place in Hull. Toni is definitely an over-thinker, to put it mildly; she can stew on anything and I think she does most of the time. So living with someone like that, I think Craig spends a lot of time trying to calm her down.

How would you describe the tone of the comedy in Hullraisers?

I think the reason we all felt so invested in the project is because the jokes are brilliant and there are great sitcom moments but we all worked really hard to embed it in truth, in the lives of these women. There's some really heightened moments, like where Toni's going mad and throwing bread cakes in a school playground, but even though it's heightened it does still feel truthful and that's what I love in comedy. Like, Stath Lets Flats is totally heightened and ridiculous but you believe the characters and you believe every decision that all those characters make. I think that's when comedy really comes alive, when someone does something crazy but you totally buy it.

I hope you're going to like these characters and warm to them. You go on a real journey with Toni but with lots of funny moments like being let loose on a children's bouncy castle, or there's another scene where Toni gate-crashes a wake. When she's throwing the bread cakes she's dressed up as a baker. I had to change costumes about ten times a day because Toni's always going mad and dressing up. It was a lot of fun.

How would you describe the way the women talk to each other: does this paint female friendships in a different way than we might have seen on TV before?

Oh, definitely. We really got to explore those bits of blunt honesty in the improv when Ian [Fitzgibbon] the director would let us play around with some of those moments. What's great about the script is that these women are super blunt but it's not nasty, they're funny within that and they make each other laugh. And it's water off a duck's back anyway. I don't know what one of them would have to say to actually offend the other because they know each other inside out and so they know what they can get away with.

They never apologise which is great because you wouldn't unless you really feel it's hurt a nerve. And a lot of the time those nerves have been struck so many times they're numb! Episode 4 is basically Toni spinning out, and Rana and Paula don't remotely mollycoddle her about that. They're more like, "Oh, here we go" but there is also a really supportive moment in that episode. I think what's really nice is we play against all those sentimental moments most of the time but every now and again when they pop up, you go, "Ah, they really are there for each other", which is lovely. That's where that warmth and that heart is.

I think in comedy you need to have characters who absolutely love each other deep down, you just don't have to show the love all the time. Equally you don't want to watch people take the mick out of each other all the time if there's no heart.

Does it feel like a sea change to be one of three female leads?

Definitely. There's lots of things in the zeitgeist that does make it feel like it's really changing, including that idea of women not having their s**t together and not having to apologise for it. And not having to have a redemption scene, you know? Where you say, "Has she corrected that flaw?" We don't worry about that on Hullraisers. In our show, Rana never apologises. She's always saying outrageous stuff and there were never really any conversations about whether people would like her or not. You would never say of a male character, "We're worried people might not like him", it's just, "He's funny." So in answer to your question, yes, I do think it's changing, and I'm delighted about that.

The series is also very honest about the realities of parenthood.

Yeah! That thing of, "I can't stay at home with my kid. It's really boring." I think that's a breath of fresh air. I think all my friends that have children will relate to that so much. A lot of my friends were a bit annoyed when they were pregnant at how many people would say, "Oh, God, parenthood's amazing, you're going to have such an amazing time" without talking about how hard it can be. I have a WhatsApp group with about seven friends from drama school and four or five of them have kids. Every now and again one of them will have a meltdown or a low day and we'll all pile in with messages of support. I think we've had TV shows before where there are clashes between parents and teenagers but not particularly with young kids, and I think it's been particularly taboo to moan about little ones. I can't think of a programme more than five years old where the parents of little kids are saying, "This child is driving me bonkers."

What was it like filming in Hull?

It was mad, because we filmed literally around the corner from where I grew up, it couldn't be closer. We were in the newsagents where I'd go as a kid and buy sweets. It was so weird. It was very familiar. We were sat outside Larkins, which is the pub my mum and my dad go to every Friday night.

What did your parents make of it?

They're over the moon but really annoyingly they weren't in Hull when we were on set! Otherwise I could have got them in as extras or something. Maybe if we get another series ... But they're really excited to see it and so are all my friends. It was really funny because I saw two people stood at the window when we were filming one scene and I thought it was just some people having a nosey but afterwards I realised it was my friend and her mum!

Did you have to exaggerate your accent?

My mum and dad are from Bradford and Newcastle so I think my accent is an approximation of both of those mixed with Hull, and also I lived in London for 10 years, so it's softened. But as soon as I'm drunk or I go back home, it gets strong again. The make-up girls Jess and Meg are also from Hull and we were all laughing because we'd been filming in Leeds for a while but we all went uber-Hull when we got to Hull for filming.. Everyone else was like, "What the hell is going on?" I'd say to Perry who plays my boyfriend, "I'll meet you back at the her-tel" and he'd be like, "her-tel?" What are you on about?"

Did you help your co-stars with their accents?

It's a golden rule that an actor should never give another actor notes! They did say, "If you hear anything wrong, pick me up on it", because it's a really distinctive accent - to get the hang of those vowels "errr nerrrr" ['oh no'] but honestly I barely ever had to say anything. Sometimes if they had a couple of days off, they'd want to go through the vowels together when they came back on set. A Hull vocal warm up.

You've clearly made great friends with them.

I have, we were such a little family and we cooked for each other the whole time. Yannick and Shobna cooked particularly delicious food! It was an amazing job to be part of.