Two of our best known charcter actresses hope the police won't recognise them in their latest caper, they tell Steve Pratt.

PASSENGERS waiting for a train at Blackburn Station were surprised to witness two of our most recognisable actresses join a group of George Formby lookalikes in an impromptu performance of his famous song When I'm Cleaning Windows.

Seeing the Formby doubles was puzzling enough, but travellers must have been even more confused by the presence of Penelope Keith and June Brown in the middle of them.

The two actresses and the Formbys were catching a train during filming of ITV1's two-hour film Margery and Gladys, showing on Sunday. The pair - best known as To The Manor Born's Audrey Fforbes-Hamilton and EastEnders' Dot Cotton - team up in the comedy-drama as an unlikely couple on the run. Keith plays Margery, a posh widower and Neighbourhood Watch stalwart who accidentally kills a young intruder in her home. She panics, and flees in her battered car with her cleaning lady Gladys Gladwell (Brown).

Brown, who took time off away from her Albert Square role to make the film, was looking forward to taking to the road at the wheel of the clapped-out. "I love driving, and was looking forward to racing the gears and going mad. But they wouldn't let me - they're so careful in filming," she says.

She used to drive herself to work regularly to Elstree Studios, where EastEnders is filmed, and still does on occasions. "Driving isn't as interesting as it was because the roads are so much fuller," she says. "As children, we lived in Suffolk and our trips were round the country lanes, blackberry picking and lovely things like that. It was a very free life in the 1930s."

Brown, who has lived with Dot for more than 18 years, was thinking it was time for a break from the BBC soap when Margery and Gladys came along. "Your fear is always that because you have played one character for so long, you'll have habits of speech, behaviour, movement," she says.

Gladys is another of what she calls "below stairs" characters that she's made a habit of playing in later life. Before she had her children, she says, she was appearing in classical plays like Hedda Gabler. "Then, when I was pregnant in my thirties, I was always covering up bulges and wearing shapeless clothes, and being below stairs."

Like Gladys, she reckons she's not very good at cleaning floors. As her husband observes in the film, "she doesn't bring her work home". She's not the greatest cleaner in the world.

"I'm good with baths, basins and bidets - all the bs," says Brown. "But not very good with floors, and lately I'm very lazy indeed and hardly do anything at all. I haven't got the energy to push the Hoover round.

"I'm afraid my car becomes an ashtray quite often, but I don't have a lot of rubbish like Gladys, who has everything under the sun tossed into the back of her car. I love it when it's tidy, but I'm not awfully good at it. I'd rather read a book."

Brown's own autobiography is at a standstill. Three-and-a-half chapters have been written, and it's been like that for a year. "We've got a lot of words on one of my daughter's computers," she says. "She hasn't had the time and I've lost the inclination. I'd rather write it myself than have a ghost writer, but whether it will ever be done, I don't know. My mother used to say, 'June is a procrastinator'. She was quite right, that is one of my sins."

Penelope Keith's "sin" in Margery and Gladys is to accidentally kill an intruder. While she goes on the run on screen, in real life the actress was upholding the law in her native Surrey. Filming came during her year-long office as High Sheriff of Surrey. Production schedules had to be juggled to enable her to carry out her duties. She was only the third woman to take the position in the county of her birth since the post was created more than 1,000 years ago.

She and Brown had never worked together before, but had met at a party Keith gave while performing in a play in London's West End, which also featured Brown's husband. "I gave a party on a Sunday, at the house where I still live," recalls Keith. "When we first met on Margery and Gladys, June remembered my sofas. She asked me, 'do you still have those lovely couches tied up with tassels?'."

Margery and Gladys: Sunday, ITV1, 9pm.