Pregnant pause

Pretending to give birth in the latest series of popular ITV1 drama The Royal caused Amy Robbins a few problems. The actress, who plays Dr Jill Weatherill, was seven months pregnant in real life at the time and worried she might start something she couldn't stop.

"I didn't want to push too hard in case something happened," she says.

"I had to do the full throes, the latter stages of labour. And I remember thinking about not doing this very realistically because I didn't want anything to pop out.

"It's all psychosomatic and if you start thinking about it you don't know what's going to happen. It was a bit hair-raising."

This is the second time she's filmed the series while pregnant. After meeting actor husband Robert Daws on the set of The Royal in 2002, they had a baby daughter, Betsy. She was joined by baby May last December.

"I just seem to be in an eternal state of pregnancy, so working on this show is just like Groundhog Day for me. I don't seem to remember a day I was in The Royal when I wasn't pregnant," she says.

Returning to begin filming the latest series coincided with discovering that she was pregnant again. Daws recalls it was nerve-wracking having to tell The Royal bosses the news.

"We had to announce it to Steve Frost, our new producer, on the week that we were starting. But luckily, Steve being Steve, he just said, 'don't worry about it, we'll just work it in'," he says.

It's all very complicated. As Robbins says: "I was actually seven months pregnant when I had supposedly just got pregnant on-screen. So there was a lot of people standing in front of me trying to shield this big bump."

She admits watching the first episode in a different way to everyone else, spending the time looking at her stomach to work out how pregnant she was.

"I can tell between one scene and the next that it was done two or three weeks apart. My stomach goes from nothing to suddenly sticking out. So that will be my entertainment for the whole series - watching my stomach go in and out and trying to remember how pregnant I was."

The couple are used to reliving their real life on screen as doctors Gordon Ormerod and Jill Weatherill. In the last series of The Royal, their characters got married. "Usually we're able to draw the line between our on and off-screen relationship but that day was different. I blubbed all the way through it, just like I did the first time," she says.

Daws found it weird seeing that episode as they'd chosen not to have their own wedding filmed and an awful lot of people who were at their real wedding were in the scene. "Including my mum and dad," says Robbins. "We got them in for fun. Mum spent all day doing exactly as she did on my real day - checking my skirt was okay."

Working together on The Royal is proving "very convenient", she says, "which is a terrible word to use, but it is." They live half the year at home in London and the remainder, while filming, in Yorkshire. "That's one of the advantages of working together in as much as we can do that," says Daws. "Because the children are pre-school age, we're not locked into schools. We just spend half the year in Leeds and it feels like home, and then we come down South and that feels like home too. It seems to work."

The cliffhanger ending of the fourth series left Dr Ormerod's future in doubt. But he always knew the character would be back for at least a few episodes and that developed into the entire fifth series.

As a result of an accident, he spends the opening episodes hopping around on crutches, which led to a real injury. "Just before Christmas I had a terrible shoulder for weeks and the doctors couldn't figure out what it was," says Daws.

Eventually he told them he'd been using crutches, the old-fashioned kind demanded by The Royal's 1960s setting. "They said they don't use them any more because they affected the nerve endings under the armpits. So I was injured by being on crutches," he says.

Getting about with two young children can be a problem too. The pair say that just getting out of the house and to the programme launch was a mission. "As anyone with young kids will know, trying to get out, even for an hour or two, is like a military operation with sterilisers and bags and nappies. But we're no more hectic than anyone else," says Robbins.

"Ask me about a third child when I've had more than four hours sleep at any one time. Never say never again but I'd give it a while. I'd like to get my figure back first. At least something resembling a waistline."

* The Royal returns to ITV1 tomorrow at 8pm.