‘I was asked if I would wear Nicole Kidman’s breasts’

Geraldine James, recently notorious as the breast-feeding mother in Little Britain, talks to Tim Walker about her role in Howard Barker’s Victory

Geraldine James’s agent telephoned one day and asked if she would care to play an over-protective mother. And he added there was something that she ought to know: it involved breast-feeding and, ah yes, the recipient would be a man in his thirties. The distinguished stage and screen actress has always liked surprising people and that was why, after she had seen the script, she agreed to appear in the ‘Bitty’ sketches in Little Britain — although not, she hastens to add, with her own breasts.

‘Everybody assumes they were mine, but in fact they were prosthetic and made by the man who made the fat suit that Matt Lucas used when he played Bubbles,’ says Miss James matter-of-factly.

‘Like Bubbles’s, they were low-slung, which was helpful because all I had to do was lift a tiny bit of my jersey and David could pile straight in.