Kate Ford on the nice side of the street

Kate Ford

She's really nice, says the publicist about Kate Ford. All publicists say this. I live for the day one will say "she's a real bitch."

This will never happen and, anyway, think of the disappointment. Because hardly anyone is a real bitch except, perhaps, for toxic Tracy Barlow, the character the really nice Kate Ford plays on Coronation Street.

Ford is really, really nice. And so she is bound to be a disappointment because I don't care what anyone says, or how gauche it is, when you meet a Corrie actor you do want them to be just a little like their character.

Yes, I know perfectly well that actors do acting, but still, if you are a Coronation Street fan the relationship can get a little complicated. They're in our living rooms quite a few hours a year while we sit on the couch and shout and tsk and occasionally shed a tear. When they come out of that box in the corner of the room, we want to have a good gawk. They put up with a lot, the poor things.

Ford started doing interviews at 7am. She has shown her jean-clad bum to the cameras on the telly. She has had an encounter with Holmes who asked her to describe the view. If she is beginning to think that New Zealand journalists are a loony lot, she's not about to say so. At radio stations she had her picture taken with the people who did the interviews.

"Unusually, people here are fans and they work in the media, which we don't really get in Britain. It's sweet. It's flattering."

She is not at all scratchy after her odd day of talking about herself for hours. She says, "you know, I've been talking about the same thing for four years. I'm used to working twelve hour days so this [doing interviews] is the same. In fact, it's easier."

Tracy is her first big role and she won't hear a word against her. She is great fun to play. "I think it's easier to play somebody that's nasty. Going into the Rovers and ordering a pint is quite difficult unless you're going in to the Rovers to order a pint because you intend to throw it over someone's head."

It is a "gift" of an acting job, she says, playing a mad woman who drugged Roy Cropper, (a man married to a transsexual) pretended they'd slept together, then said she was pregnant to him, then threatened an abortion unless he paid her big money for the baby. "Yeah, well, barking. At first I was really worried about it backfiring because it was so extreme but then I remember thinking 'you know, in Shakespeare Bottom turns into an ass.' Nobody wants to see something real. People want to see a story and a fantasy. So what if it is a bit over the top?"

She is the fourth actor to have played Tracy which is a bit over the top. "You know, as long as you've got the same hair colour you can bring anyone back." They're a pragmatic lot these Corrie actors. Working 12 hour days will do that, she says. I wonder whether it's why they're such a good-natured lot. She's a big star, but she doesn't have any big star silliness.

She says Corrie has taught her about hard work, "and, I'll tell you what, the one thing it does is knock any crap out of you, any bullshit. Even if you are floored, you've still got to pull a performance out of the bag because no one gives a toss whether it's seven o'clock in the morning or seven o'clock at night. The viewers don't care. They're not going to go, 'oh well, that was all right but it was seven o'clock in the morning.' They don't know when you shot it, so you know you can't use that excuse."

You'd think she'd be enjoying a break from playing Tracy but she is more than willing to, unasked, put on pouty Tracy. "I do things like, you know, when she was upset, I'd suck my thumb on the set just so she looked ..." She tosses her sulky head and looks just like Tracy in a snit. What fun.

And probably more fun than talking about herself. "I am quite a private person. The celebrity thing is not of interest to me. I don't really do many things. Not a lot of people know that much about me, which is fine with me."

She doesn't mind them knowing that she campaigns for more humane animal farming practices, is anti-fur wearing and votes Green. She had a pleasant, happy middle-class childhood; she rode horses and went to acting classes. She didn't ever know that she was going to be any good at acting. "I don't even know now that I'm good. You always think today's the day it's going to go wrong, you know what I mean?" She has won awards for Best TV Bitch. She has a trophy with Best Bitch engraved on it. "Yeah, mad, isn't it?" She says she'd "rather not talk about the money, if that's okay." She is rumoured to get around 90,000 quid ($270,000) a year. She says she's "quite good at spending my money on clothes."

She says when actors join the Corrie cast, "they give you this thing called the royal family chat. And they say, you will be as recognisable as the royal family from now on in Britain. And you think, 'oh, yeah, right.' But you are! But to be honest they don't give you any way to deal with it. You've just got to deal with it and some people deal with it more than others. I've been all right with it."

The scrutiny is hard to escape. "People are obsessed with it, aren't they. They want to know anything. They want to know what you eat for breakfast. Who cares? They'll take pictures of what you have for lunch and put it in the paper. There's this whole national obsession with food, which I find really damaging. In England it's stupid. Everyone's obsessed with what people are eating and what they weigh."

She's a level-headed girl. She hasn't, like some others we won't name, been caught snorting cocaine or sprawled drunk in a gutter. "No, well maybe I'm just dull. [But] I bloody well hope not."

She is not at all dull. She is capable of mischief. She spends quite a bit of time trying to convince me that Sunita (played by her good mate, Shobna Gulati) is far and away a bigger slag than Tracy. This is nonsense. Tracy's had everyone. "No. Sunita's had everyone. Everyone calls Tracy a slapper, but Sunita's slept with more men on the street than Tracy. The quiet ones get away with it. The quiet ones are the ones to watch. Everyone's going, 'what a sweet and innocent girl' and actually, she's knocking off quite a few more. Ha."

She does a reasonable job, too, of talking Tracy up as, of all things, a sort of feminist icon. "A lot of women come up to me and say 'I really like Tracy Barlow, I really admire Tracy Barlow. She does what she wants and she doesn't care whether men hate her or like her. I want women to like her. I like her. Do you like her?"

No, of course I don't like her. She's a dreadful bitch. My face clearly gives this away. "You don't like her!" Ford says, as though she simply can't believe this. What a good actor she is. There is a flaw in her argument, anyway, as any Corrie watcher will know: She did love Steve. "She did. But She Doesn't Any More. Ha, ha. We've all been there."

Only on Coronation Street, I say, could Steve MacDonald be a sex symbol. "No comment! I mean I think he's got something." What, exactly, has he got? "The eyes. I mean it was really funny, how these women were all fighting over Steve. You know, there's women killing each other over Steve and he's a cabby. Who's a chauv. He really has got nothing going for him. It's hilarious."

Which brings us to the embarrassing moment. The standard stupid question which I figure will be a good test of how polite she really is. So, I tell her that when Suranne Jones - who played Tracy Barlow's arch-rival for the affections of Steve MacDonald - came to town in 2004, I asked the girls at work what they really wanted to know. What they wanted to know was whether Steve was a good kisser. I should have known better than to have stupidly repeated this exercise before I going to see Ford, but I didn't.

"What did Suranne say?" she says. That he was. "Yes. He is actually a very good kisser, I have to say." And how does she judge these things? "I've kissed a few men in my life."

A nice girl, then. But not all that nice, thank goodness.