Two years ago Sarah Parish seemed to be in everything, from Netflix’s Geek Girl, in which she was an imperious model agency chief, to Paramount+’s dystopian Curfew, where she was (as so often) a veteran cop. The scene seared into me, however, is from BBC1’s Industry. As the predatory financial client Nicole Craig, Parish had sex with an investment banker 30 years her junior but the morning after woke up dead — a bad outcome but, you know, good for Nicole anyway.
So I am alarmed to see who Parish portrays in ITV’s frenetic police academy sitcom Piglets, which returns this week for a widely unexpected second series. In a savage grey wig and tombstone fake gnashers, she is Superintendent Julie Spry, a lesbian who admits to having been called a “barren, withered hag”.
“I’d forgotten about that line,” Parish says when we meet in her exceptionally large house in Hampshire, which she shares with her actor husband, James Murray (today out fishing), their 15-year-old daughter, and workers for their charity, whose origins and aims Parish will later explain. “Julie did find that a step too far. She could probably handle ‘barren’, but ‘withered’? I think she thinks she’s still got a good few years in her yet. I think she thinks she’s fairly attractive.”
In any case, I say, Parish, who is 57, looks about 20 years younger than Spry. Is she that rare thing, an actor without vanity?
“But I think there can’t really be vanity in acting. I mean, I understand that there is. I know there is because whenever I do want to play a part with no make-up, the first thing the make-up lady says is, ‘Don’t worry, we can stick on some false lashes…’”
As she had done for lonesome Anna Rampton, the BBC’s “director of better”, in W1A, to play Nicole in Industry she worked up the character’s backstory. “Who am I? Why would I do that? So when you go into a scene like that, you know why you’re doing it. It’s not just, ‘Now we’ve got to simulate hard sex in front of an entire crew and it’s going to be awkward.’”
And for Spry, how much hinterland was necessary? “Not a lot really. It’s all about the wig and the teeth.”
So, what does she think of critics these days, I ask. The first season of Piglets was ITVX’s biggest comedy yet and attracted an average of 1.6 million viewers a week, but it received astonishingly bad notices — even the Police Federation, which found its title offensive, piled in. “Well, it is the Marmite of sitcoms, isn’t it, really?” Parish says.
With Mark Heap in the new season of Piglets
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I say The Times gave it four stars. “Good grief,” she says with a gasp. “Comedy is a very personal thing. If you don’t like slapstick, stupid, in-your-face, on-crack comedy, this isn’t for you. If you want to watch W1A, which is very naturalistic and almost a mockumentary, then Piglets is not going to be for you. But as actors, we want to do everything.”
I gamely suggest that Piglets is about hormonally charged youngsters and antediluvian oldsters trying to navigate woke. “I do think there is a time and a place for political correctness,” she says. “And I’m all for political correctness. There’s a place for Les Dawson. There’s not a place for Bernard Manning, because one was funny in a loving way and one wasn’t funny, in a hateful way.”
But our discussion misses the defiant pointlessness of Piglets. The two 22-year-old charity workers who live above her garage love it, she says, “but I haven’t even let my husband watch it because I know he’ll just go, ‘This is so stupid.’”
The two of them (Murray plays Prince Andrew in The Crown) sometimes discuss their careers. Would it have been better had they been bigger stars, or would fame have intruded upon their own hinterlands? In truth it was not really a choice. There were rumours 25 years ago that Parish had signed a “golden handcuffs” exclusivity deal with ITV, but she says that was never true and the overexposure would probably have been unwise in any case.
Did she ever feel on the cusp of true stardom? After, perhaps, playing the head stylist in the hairdressing drama Cutting It at the turn of the century, or the randy GP Katie in Mistresses a little later? “I don’t think I ever was on the cusp of it. I was always like a C student at school and I’ve always just been a working actor, just a jobbing actor. And sometimes that’s really frustrating and sometimes it’s a real gift because it means you can go for all sorts of different parts. I don’t get great big huge leads in amazing things, but I get really good parts.”
She was the title character, a psychopathic senior cop, in ITV’s compelling thriller Bancroft but it was cancelled after two seasons. The first, in the winter of 2017, had huge viewing figures because, she says modestly, Britain was snowed in. Come season two, the weather and ratings were less kind. “It’s not about the show a lot of the time: it’s just about the luck.”
Parish may be the least egotistical, most grounded actor I have interviewed. Perhaps she was always like this, the Somerset girl who wanted to be a dancer but was judged by the Royal Ballet School to be growing too tall so joined instead Yeovil Youth Theatre, which was more fun and less commitment. After drama school, she worked in “very odd pub and physical” theatre until her first television job: “I thought, ‘Oh, hello. This money is great.’” Filming Cutting It in Manchester, she partied hard. “We were of an age where we could do a whole day’s filming and then go out and get drunk and get up the next day and still look good. Which, of course, can’t happen now.”
Yet mothers on ITV dramas begin every evening with a “well-earned” glass of wine? “I noticed that the other day. Like, every time I see this woman — I won’t say the show — she’s got a massive glass in her hand. I’d be absolutely shit-faced.”
Parish and her husband James Murray have raised millions for children’s charities
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Or perhaps her wisdom was hard-won. In 2008, the year after marrying Murray, her first daughter, Ella-Jayne, was born with the rare genetic disorder Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome. It is highly debilitating but not in itself life-limiting. Three days after Ella-Jayne’s birth, however, the baby needed her first heart surgery.
“It would have meant a hoist. It would have been maybe non-verbal. It would have been a very, very different life for us. But we got better at it. We were like, ‘OK, we can do it. We’ll manage. We’ll do it.’ And you start to look forward to that life: ‘This is going to be great. This is a real challenge but we can do it.’ And then for it to be snatched away so quickly…”
• Sarah Parish: ‘We lived with the blind hope our daughter would survive’
In January 2009 Ella-Jayne died. “In that very short time we had gone through so many different emotions. The highs and lows of waiting for operations. Is she going to live? So many times being rushed to the hospital because she’s about to die and then she doesn’t. For nine months basically you are living by your fingernails. And then it’s over.”
Someone told them they needed to go to the Maldives or somewhere and recover. “And Jim and I thought about it and went, ‘God, you know, I think that sounds like possibly the worst thing we could ever do.’ To sit in silence on a hot beach with nothing to do apart from think about our dead daughter. What is the opposite of that? Let’s do the opposite of that. And the opposite of that was to surround ourselves with children and surround ourselves with grief and despair and tragedy.”
So for two months they volunteered in orphanages in Vietnam and Cambodia. Not long after their return, she discovered she was pregnant again. At 32 weeks, however, came another crisis. She was losing amniotic fluid. In November Nell, at just 3lb 10oz, was born by emergency caesarean and placed in neonatal care. Parish had post-traumatic stress disorder and post-natal depression after this birth. Therapy and “brilliant” antidepressants helped. After five weeks Nell was home, and she is now enduring her mock GCSEs.
• James Murray: The pain of losing our baby was unbearable. Fishing was how I coped
“Sometimes I didn’t cope. Sometimes you listen to people who have been through it and they sound like these two incredible stoic people, but we both had terrible days where we fell apart. We both had days where we couldn’t cope with each other’s grief, couldn’t cope with our own.
“I’d been very lucky in life. Jim and I were rolling along, having a lovely time. Moved out to the country to start a family. Ticked every box, as they say. We were both working, both leading shows. And then suddenly something puts a spanner in the works and it’s quite unbelievable. But in hindsight, everything happens for a reason and it’s often those terrible, terrible things that lead you in the direction that you were always supposed to go. I think if Jim and I had just carried on… I don’t know if we’d still be… I don’t… We would just be very different people. Maybe not as patient, maybe not as nice.”
The literal bottom line is that they have since raised millions for child charities. The Murray Parish Trust, now renamed Imagine This, supports the mental health of seriously ill children and their families (its HQ is Parish’s kitchen). In addition, as patrons of Friends of Southampton Children’s Hospital’s paediatric intensive care unit, Murray and Parish raised funds to buy it an MRI scanner. Last year the King presented them with MBEs for their efforts.
Next to this, it seems trivial to ask her about older women in TV drama, but Parish has views on this, mainly that there are too few. People tell her it would be a good idea to revive Mistresses 15 years on. She heartily agrees, but it does not have to be Mistresses.
“What I’d like to see on TV is more programmes about people like me. That’s why we watch TV, isn’t it? We want to see a slightly heightened version of ourselves. And because the biggest demographic of people watching TV is women between the ages of 50 and 70, I would hope that there would be more on TV for us to watch.
“I want to see women of my age having sex. I want to see them thinking about things that we’re not allowed to talk about. As you come into your fifties, a big part of ageing is, especially for a woman, you become slightly invisible.
“I think there is definitely a place out there at the moment, a place for something like Mistresses, just something that’s quite fun, a little bit glossy but still based in reality, looking at all of those different difficulties women have in their fifties and sixties when they’re still working, still attractive, still want to be attractive, still want romance, still want adventure. But a lot of the time they’re put out to pasture.”
Well, I say, 50 is not old and it comes with experience. “And it’s sexy. I think 50 and 60 is sexy. It’s great. And we need to embrace it as a human race. We’re so obsessed with youth.”
The young bloke on Industry thought 50 was sexy. Parish clearly believes Superintendent Spry would agree. Parish’s availability in 2026 is good. What’s everyone waiting for?
Piglets series two begins on ITV2 and ITVX on Jan 15 at 10.05pm