Steve Pratt talks to Maggie O'Neil about playing the reclusive and pregnant Sheila in cult TV programme Shameless, which returns for a new series next year, following a fairly fraught Christmas special.

MAGGIE O'Neill jokes that she's the actress who killed off Peak Practice. She joined the cast of the long-running ITV medical series and, 18 months later, the drama was axed. But she doesn't see how her character, Dr Alex Redman, could return even if the ITV powers-that-be ever decided to revive the series. "I went over the cliff in a lesbian embrace - I don't think I'll be coming back," she says.

O'Neill will be seen on screen again, however, in the second series of Paul Abbott's award-winning Manchester-set family saga Shameless which begins with a Christmas special next week. The actress spent the majority of the first series indoors as agoraphobic Sheila, dosed up to her eyeballs on pills and having an passionate affair with David Threlfall's drunken Gallagher patriarch Frank.

We left Sheila able to leave the house and pregnant with twins. She gives birth on Christmas Day, although the event is very different to a virgin birth in a stable. "Basically she's pregnant and even more of a drama queen that she was in the first series. She's so much in her own universe. She's a little disturbed," says O'Neill.

"What I really do like about Sheila is that she just wants to love and be loved. I think she's the sort of person I would like as a friend. She's good fun. Although she's not a real character, I feel very protective of her."

As you'd expect in the Gallagher household, the birth isn't a straightforward delivery. "All the family are present and somehow Countdown gets involved too," she says. There are ten parts in the second series, which starts in the New Year and O'Neill likes the writing so much that she's happy to continue as Sheila for as long as she's asked. "It's one of those series that can potentially go anywhere. I'm happy to stick with it," she says.

"I've never really liked doing really long runs before. Most of my stuff has been in three or six part series, although I did Peak Practice for one-and-a-half years. But I was always joking I was the actress who finished off the series.

"The thing about Shameless is that it's only six months filming. Peak Practice went on all year which I found quite difficult." The series is filmed on a real housing estate in Manchester where, she says, the locals have been very welcoming and friendly.

She's received good feedback on Shameless too from a wide range of people. "I've had a lot of old people coming up and screaming with laughter about some of the scenes," she says.

"People who like it come from across the board, it's not just young people. Paul deals with quite a lot of taboos and swearing, but he does in quite a fun way. His writing manages to be right on the job and also warm without being sentimental."

Working with a large ensemble cast, both young and old, is a pleasure. "Because we're all different age groups there are different kinds of energy," she says. "The really young ones aren't trained but are fantastic. They get asked to do anything and they do it. It's a little lesson in acting. They have no ego problems or anything."

One scene in the first scene proved very daunting for O'Neill, the one in which Sheila uses a very large sex aid on lover Frank. "She thinks it's a lovely gift for Frank, but he hates it," says O'Neill. "I'm not fond of that dildo. To be honest, it scared the hell out of me. It was a monster. I just wanted to get it away from me."

The scene made such an impact that it's led to her being recognised in unusual places. "I did an episode of Blue Murder up there and was on a train when these lads got on near Manchester. They were about 14 and said, 'Eh, you, it's Sheila from Shameless. Where's your big dildo?'," she recalls.

"They kept going up and down the train. I don't want to be known as the big dildo woman."

But the TV programme for which she gets recognised the most is Take Me Home, Tony Marchant's late 1989 drama about Keith Barron's taxi driver having an affair with a younger girl (played by O'Neill).

"You get in the back of a cab and they can't remember who you are. They say, 'It's the taxi one' and that they really like the series. It was my second job out of drama school and really summed up the 1980s quite well," she says.

* Shameless Christmas Special is on C4 on December 23 at 9pm and repeated on December 27 at 11.05pm

Published: 19/12/2004