I had a great time working with Peter Capaldi on The Hour. I felt such an affinity with Peter. We’d sit on the stairs in our old-fashioned costumes – we both looked extremely old-fashioned, from another world, and somehow I think we felt that. The scene where I told him our long-lost daughter was dead – we stood there looking at each other and we said, this is just so sad. Brilliant writing. Abi Morgan is genuinely interested in middle-aged women, as I am. Often you do a part and think, well this is interesting but not as interesting as my life. Not with this.

[…] The Hour is a period television series predicated on the idea that the people who lived and breathed during the past were in fact people — that although the patriarchy had a profound effect on women it did not have the effect of entirely depersonalising them, of divesting them of their aspirations and their dreams, of divesting them of an internal life. The patriarchy did not and does not create women who care only about wallpaper and make-up; the patriarchy created (and creates) women whose only sphere of influence was over the appearance of their homes and their bodies, whose only modes of self-expression were the superficial, the ‘meaningless’.

In the fourth episode of the series Marnie argued with Hector about wallpaper not because she considers wallpaper so important in and of itself but for the same reason that armies will fight for years over a strip of land: because one concession leads to another — and she had already been forced to concede so much that wallpaper was all she had left to fight for.