“I JUST think the older people get the more interesting their lives become,” Julie Graham is telling me. “You have a whole wealth of experience; life experience, things that have happened to you, a sense of confidence. All of those things become richer and richer and richer.”

At 54, a mother, a divorcee, a woman who has loved and lost, who has recently remarried and, of course, an actor with a career that stretches back to the late 1980s, Graham can claim to be speaking from a position of knowledge. That’s why the next thing she says cuts so deep.

“For men in the profession that’s very much reflected. But as soon as a woman hits that age somehow commissioners lose interest in them and think they don’t have a lot to say and don’t have a lot to offer. I think the exact opposite is true.”

Graham, you could say, is living proof. To spend any time in her company is to be in the presence of a woman who is positively hoaching with self-confidence, life experience, good and bad, and a willingness to speak out about all of it.

Graham is in London today promoting her new Channel 5 drama series Penance. Unfortunately, I’m in Scotland. Blame it on the bathroom. Domestic emergency. So, we must speak on the phone. I have workmen coming in and out of the room, looking for the boiler, while we talk. “Can you give me a minute, Julie?” I find myself repeating on a regular basis. She graciously does.

Penance is the brainchild of novelist Kate O’Riordan and places Graham’s fifty-something character front and centre in the drama. In that, you could argue, it’s part of the female-centred Happy Valley dividend in British TV drama.

“There’s not enough of it as far as I’m concerned, “ Graham suggests. “I think it’s definitely getting better and it’s on the right trajectory. But it’s still slow off the mark. I think it’s only just catching up with what is going on in the outside word.

“Drama should hold a mirror up to society. And, although that is getting better, for a long time it wasn’t at all. And a lot of women, especially my age, in their fifties, have felt very invisible for a long time. In every walk of life, but especially in the arts.”

Actually, that reminds me of something. Is it true, I ask Graham, that she was told that ITV dropped their popular drama series The Bletchley Circle, in which she appeared alongside Rachael Stirling, because it had another female-led show ready to go?

“That’s what I was told from the horse’s mouth. ‘There’s another female-led drama in the offing so there’s not really room for another one.’

“In the realms of believability that seems ridiculous, but that’s what the attitude was for a long time. They didn’t think there was an appetite for audiences to watch female-led drama. I think that is slowly changing.”

The Bletchley Circle, at least, was picked up by Netflix and given a transfer to San Francisco. “But in terms of age brackets, there are still hardly any women over the age of 50 on television in leading roles in drama,” Graham points out. “They are few and far between. They’re as rare as rocking-horse s***.”

Which makes something like Penance all the more welcome, presumably. “When I was offered this, I bit their hand off. It was so unusual to be offered that sort of things at my age really.”

The #MeToo and the Times Up movements are making a difference, Graham suggests, but what’s really needed is an extinction event. “All the dinosaurs need to be wiped out. You can’t just sack them. When they die out things have to change.”

You’d want Graham in your corner, wouldn‘t you? She’s this fierce, outspoken force of nature. She’s also one of British television’s most reliable pleasures. From At Home with the Braithwaites to Benidorm, from William and Mary to Shetland, she has been a smart piece of casting for so many TV dramas.

Penance is no different. Graham is at the drama’s heart. She plays Rosalie, a mother and wife who has just lost her grown-up son in a holiday accident. “It’s essentially a study in grief and the fallout from that,” Graham points out “and how people behave and how vulnerable they are. The fallout is huge.

If you are dealing with loss (and, yes, my hand is up at this point) it might not be the easiest of watches. But it is a good example of how popular drama can deal with the toughest of subjects.

“In terms of Rosalie’s grief, the loss of a child is a unique kind,” Graham suggests. “It’s not the correct order of things. For me, it’s hard to draw on anything. I have never experienced that, and I would never want to . You have to imagine what that might be like.”

In those circumstances, she adds, you may well act in ways that are inappropriate, “because you are very vulnerable.” That is very much the case with Rosalie. “I think that’s what attracted me to it because when I was reading the script on page after page, I was screaming at her: ‘Don’t do it.’

“But I think people make bad decisions when they’re grieving. They are easily preyed upon. Their guard is down.”

Penance also gives Graham the chance to play the mum of a teenage girl, played in this case by fellow Scot Tallulah Greive. That gave her the chance to draw on something she did know. She has two daughters Edie May and Cyd, from her marriage to fellow actor Joseph Bennett.

There’s a scene where Grieve is hunched over the toilet bowl in the first episode of Penance. When, I ask Graham, did you last rub someone’s back while they threw up in the toilet in real life. “Well, I have teenage daughters, so I do it frequently,” she tells me. “I’ve tended to teenagers and not just my own teenagers. I’ve had experience of them coming back from parties slightly the worse for wear. Holding hair back. Trying not to get it on you.”

When was the last time you threw up in the toilet though, Julie?

“When was the last time I threw up? I have no idea. Through drink? Certainly not for a long time. I like to think I’m slightly more grown up than that. I don’t remember. I really don’t like being sick, so I try to avoid it at all costs.”

Working with Greive, what struck her about the younger actor, “apart from the fact that she is a gorgeous human being,” Graham says, was her professionalism.

“ When I was that age, I was quite wild. She’s very conscientious. I remember her being a sponge wanting to know about aspects of the business. She seems like she’s way ahead of me in terms of what I was like at that age. I think I was probably a bit all over the place.”

Maybe with good reason. And that takes us back to life experience.

When she was 18, Julie Graham struck out for London. She had grown up in Glasgow (she still considers it home; “If I had a blankie it would be Glasgow”), with her mum Betty who was a single parent and worked in theatre. They had moved to Irvine when she was 11, much to Graham’s initial disgust. It was the death of her mum at the age of 50, that prompted the teenager to leave her home country.

Who was that 18-year-old who went to London, Julie? “I was a bit lost. I was grieving. I also felt emboldened as well. I felt very excited about moving away and going to London, so it was a real dichotomy; a mixture of feeling very, very fearful and very excited.

“The other thing it gave me was a sense of being bold and brave. Sometimes, you’ve just got to close your eyes and jump off the cliff.

“I think maybe if my mum had lived, I might not have had the bravery to do that. I might have stuck at home.”

Graham was seduced by the capital when she arrived, she says. She ended up in Soho, surrounded by drag queens and gay men and dandies and prostitutes. “It actually felt like a very safe environment for a young girl because they would look out for you. If anybody gave you any hassle there’d be three women screaming abuse at them.”

She soon became part of the community, even working the door on a strip club. How did that come about?

“I was in a cafe with friends. I was having a laugh and I think I was being quite mouthy, to be honest. This guy came up and we got chatting. He said, ‘What do you do?’ And I said, ‘I’m not doing anything.’ He said, ‘Come and work in my club.’ I said, ‘What club?’ He said, ‘it’s Pussy Galore.’

“And I was like, ‘OK, I know your game.’ And he said, ‘No, no, no, I’m not asking you to strip. I need someone to work the door. I need someone who’s confident because we get a lot of weirdos.’

“Anyway, I ended up working on the door. It’s a very boring story to be honest, but it gave me a sense of belonging. I felt I belonged to Soho.

“And I just loved the women. The women who worked there were just hilarious. They came from all walks of life, students, single mothers. One of them was a grandmother. And they just didn’t take any s***. You would not mess with them. They really looked after me.”

When she wasn’t working, Graham could often be found hanging around the Colony Room and other pubs, drinking with the likes of actor Michael Elphick (“He was the best company”) and Neil Morrissey (who just so happens to be playing her husband in Penance. (“We’ve been having a lot of fun reminiscing.”).

I’m assuming back then drink was often taken, Julie. “Oh God, yeah. I’m amazed I can remember anything. I do remember once ending up in Jeffrey Bernard’s flat.”

Ah, the legendary Soho racing journalist and raconteur. “I think he had one leg at the time. He was in a wheelchair. All these misfits and drunks would wheel him back and forth. I do remember pushing him along in his wheelchair through Berwick Street market absolutely steaming at four in the afternoon.

“And he was a terrible flirt. I was so young at the time and he shouldn’t have been a very attractive man on paper – he was a terrible drunk, he was wizened, he was thin and he had one leg – and yet he was one of the most charming people and one of the sexiest men I’ve ever met.

“It was all to do with his intellect and wit. I just used to soak up their stories.”

She had long thought of pursuing an acting career. “I think it was probably in my bones because of my mum. I had been brought up in theatres and around people in the business. I think I suppressed it a bit, but I always knew at the back of my mind it’s what I wanted to do.

“But I wasn’t in any rush to do it. I kind of wanted to have a bit of life experience first. I auditioned for drama school in Glasgow and I didn’t get that and I’m really glad I didn’t get in. Going to London and mucking about and doing silly jobs just gave me a lot of life experience. And eventually, when I did dip my toes into the profession, I felt like I had something to feed off.”

The thing about life experience, of course, is that it keeps coming. I think it’s fair to say that Graham has had a tough few years. She married Bennett in 2002, after she had moved out to Brighton. They had their two children but then the marriage foundered.

Worse was to follow. In 2015, Bennett took his own life. By then the couple were divorced but his death inevitably had an impact on her and her daughters. “It was very tough. He was the father of my children and it was very hard for them.”

At the time Graham was already dealing with the death of her best friend and fellow actor Clare Cathcart, who died from an asthma attack in 2014.

“And then my cousin died. There were three incidents all within six months of each other. It was very, very hard.

“I suppose you’re resilient because you’ve got children and you’ve got to be there for them. And, also, my best friend left two very young children and I wanted to be there for them. It was a hideous time.”

What she has learned from all this, she says, is that life is for living. “It’s not for dwelling on. It’s not for worrying about. It’s not for projecting into the future or living in the past. It’s about being in the moment and appreciating what you have at that time.”

And the thing is, in life new beginnings are always possible. “Oh absolutely,” she says. “Of course, they are.”

She has had one of her own. Last October Graham married Davy Crocket, a skydiving instructor whom she met while filming Benidorm. “That was wonderful and unexpected, I have to say.”

And so here we are in 2020, with Graham at home on the screen and in her own life. “We’re just forming another little family,” she says of her new husband and her daughters. “I feel in a very good place actually. I’m always grateful to be working. Life is good definitely.”

Let’s leave her there. Julie Graham is a woman with no shortage of life experience. But, as she says, it’s the living that really matters.

Penance begins on Channel 5 on Tuesday at 9pm.