The great outdoors has lured Felicity Kendal away from the city and it’s all because of Rosemary and Thyme.
Felicity explains: “This series has made me passionately keen on having a garden and being out with a dog. In the past I’ve had gardens and smallholdings, but for years I was working very hard with two children and living a London life. The programme has taken me full circle and I’ve now got a house in Hampshire with a new puppy.
“We have a cocker spaniel that I saw when we were on a location and it was love at first sight. I couldn’t have dogs before because I had cats and lived near the city but now we’ve got somewhere in the country it’s bliss.”
The star, who plays Rosemary Boxer in the horticultural whodunit, has been surprised by the popularity of the series. “I believed in it but you never know until it goes out what people are going to think,” she says. “Usually it’s the script that decides what I do rather than anything else but I got hooked on the idea.
“Pam Ferris and I both love doing the series. It’s clean and positive and hands in the earth, which is great. You film outside for months which is just heaven when you normally work in the dark, at night or in the studio.”
In the first series Rosemary described herself as “more bookworm than earthworm”. She is a lecturer in applied horticulture at the University of Malmesbury.
Pam Ferris, who plays Laura Thyme, is far more hands-on.
“We’ve got under the skin of our characters,” says Felicity. That wasn’t always the case. “Doing the series was a complete leap in the dark because we didn’t know each other,” she says. “It’s incredibly hard work to make it look real and fun but it is helped by the fact that we get on so well. We are together from seven in the morning until seven at night, six days a week.”
“Rosemary is a bit of an enigma,” says Felicity. “Laura has a family and a very definite background but we still don’t know much about Rosemary. I like that because when you meet someone in real life you don’t know everything about them straight away.
“Rosemary is a bit of a loner; she’s very self-sufficient and a bit more acerbic than Laura, but we don’t know how she’s come to be like that.”
“What’s funny is that our characters are the opposite of real life,” she admits. “Rosemary is a specialist but I know nothing about gardening, while Laura is an amateur but Pam is fanatic and knows the name of every bush, in Latin.”
