'Who's My Dream Co-Star? Julie Walters!

Former EastEnders star Jo Joyner chats country life and dancing in her wellies – and reveals her acting inspiration

- Katherine Hassell

When she was asked to star in BBC1’s new daytime drama Shakespeare & Hathaway – Private Investigators, actress Jo Joyner found it an offer she just couldn’t refuse.

For starters, her character – former hairdresser Luella Shakespeare – was a breath of fresh air.

‘Lu, being bright and bubbly and happy and positive, is what really drew me to her,’ grins Jo, ‘because I can play some quite miserable, fierce people.’

The scripts were fabulously funny, with intriguing mysteries and an added layer of references to the Bard. Her co-star, as gone-to-seed private eye Frank Hathaway, was Mark Benton of Waterloo Road, Northern Lights and Strictly fame.

But the icing on the cake? As Jo, 40, tells Woman’s Weekly, it was filmed on her doorstep, so she could still spend time with husband Neil Madden and their twins Fred and Edie, eight.

Shakespeare & Hathaway was filmed in Stratford-uponAvon, William Shakespeare’s birthplace, just down the road from your home…

I live in a village equidistant from Stratford, Leamington and Warwick, so it was a 20-minute commute. I hadn’t planned to be working as I’d been away so long filming the Channel 4 school drama Ackley Bridge. I was going to be at home being a mum. But when they said, ‘It’s Mark and it’s in Stratford,’ it was all a bit too brilliant to say no. I could have friends meet me for lunch, and my kids met me after school for dinner.

Stratford’s quite touristy. Did you film on the streets with an audience?