This Time with Alan Partridge's Susannah Fielding: 'I think I'd do a great job on Good Morning Britain'
Susannah Fielding knows a thing or two about grinning and bearing it. As Jennie Gresham, the co-host of a spoof One Show-style magazine programme on This Time with Alan Partridge, she has to grin and bear it through all manner of claptrap that comes out of the mouth of her infamous East Anglian co-presenter. As a young actress, she has had to grin and bear a misogynistic industry. She even grins and politely bears my inevitable question about her two‑year relationship with the actor Tom Hiddleston (which ended 10 years ago). She is unflappable. And the smile rarely wavers. You can imagine real-life Jennie Greshams like Susanna Reid or Holly Willoughby admiring (and sympathising).
Speaking of Reid, there’s a vacancy on the Good Morning Britain sofa. Who would Fielding like to see replace Piers Morgan? “I think I would do a great job,” she says, without hesitation. “Me and Susanna Reid, we’d have an absolute riot. And we’d finally be changing the age-old dynamic of the curmudgeonly old man and the glamorous sidekick. Maybe we can have two glamorous sidekicks.”
Ironically, in a reverse of what happened on GMB, the first series of This Time ended with Gresham storming off the set, in her case after one too many jibes from Steve Coogan’s Partridge. She’s back for the new series, though, with the pair patched up and, possibly, growing closer. Gresham is a perfect comic construct, at once the consummate chat show host, all eyelashes, legs and teeth, but also, thanks to Fielding’s subtle performance, we see a whole narrative, played out in glances and barely perceptible tilts of the head, about her feelings towards the abominable Partridge. “I have to do a lot with my eyes,” she says, “and not much else.”
Speaking over video chat from east London, the 35-year-old has had a better 12 months than many in the arts (“friends of mine, well-known actors, are riding bikes for Deliveroo,” she says). As well as filming series two of This Time, she has recorded a few voice gigs from her wardrobe.
Fielding would love to get back on stage, but fears that if she were to sign up to theatre work, it would never get produced. The stage is her first love. She was raised by her mother in “precarious” circumstances in Hampshire, but a scholarship to West Sussex boarding school Christ’s Hospital gave Fielding access to theatre, including one formative excursion to see the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Tempest. “There was a huge mechanical boat moving around on the stage. I remember sitting there, my heart racing, shivers going up my spine. And I still feel like that when I go to the theatre.”
A decade on, she was working for the RSC, winning awards for her portrayal of Portia in The Merchant of Venice. A string of roles in British sitcoms followed, before her fruitful relationship with writer Mike Bartlett (Doctor Foster) led her to dramas Sticks and Stones and Life.
Comedy is important to Fielding. As a child she avidly watched classic sitcoms such as Fawlty Towers and Last of the Summer Wine. That vintage of comedy is under attack, with episodes that contain “offensive” material being pulled or slapped with content warnings. Does that play on the mind of modern-day comedy-makers? “I think it has to,” says Fielding. “But what’s miraculous about Partridge is, he’s treading a very, very fine line a lot of the time – whether he’s talking about MeToo or race, somehow his character allows for hot topics to be pulled apart.”
MeToo and misogyny in the media are two of the hot topics that This Time handled beautifully. It tackled them directly, by interviewing a “guest” about modern feminism, but indirectly too, via the professional relationship between Gresham and Partridge. It’s one we recognise – an older man, un-PC, bit of a wild card, prone to mansplaining and manspreading, and a younger, glamorous woman, who is always on her best behaviour, keeping the unruly man in check. Even in 2021, there is something decidedly 1950s about our TV presenting duos.
More insidiously, we saw flashes of the relationship between Gresham and Partridge’s predecessor, the late John Baskill, a national treasure who, it seems, died before Operation Yewtree could get him. Gresham, ostensibly, doted on him, but we saw clues – a hand lingering on the knee, a hug lasting slightly too long – that their relationship was unequal and uneasy. It didn’t take much to imagine what Baskill would have been like after a few drinks. Fielding can recognise the professional landscape Gresham has had to navigate.
“There have been times when you don’t kick up a fuss: you find a way of laughing it off, a way of keeping the boundary, but in a light-hearted way, because you don’t want to be seen to be making trouble. And I’d be surprised if there are many women who haven’t had to learn that dance. It’s quite tiring and quite annoying.”
Fielding believes things have changed and credits the MeToo and TimesUp movements with creating a “global voice” that supports women. That voice was certainly not there when, 21 years old and fresh out of drama school, Fielding was sent to do a photo shoot in a house “somewhere in north London”. The shoot, it transpired, was for popular lads’ mag FHM and involved lingerie and a series of compromising positions.
“I was on my own,” she recalls, “with a male photographer and a mainly male crew, and left to fend for myself. I didn’t feel able to say ‘I don’t want to be in that position’ or ‘I don’t want to wear that’. There was no precedent for saying no.” She tells me that as a young actress “your next job is very much based on your reputation in this industry and there’s always a slight fear that if you’re not easy to work with, if you’re deemed difficult, you might not be employed again”.
The fragility of an acting career, particularly for women, is well illustrated in Fielding’s short time in Los Angeles, where she filmed the sitcom The Great Indoors. Making the show was a joy, but the lifestyle did not suit her and being on the LA audition circuit became a grind. “You spend days driving around in 40-degree heat, dressed up like a doll, going up for roles that they’re seeing 5,000 other people for, a load of whom are models. It wasn’t very humane.” The show was cancelled after one series and Fielding gave LA a go for a few more months, but soon missed Marks & Spencer, roast dinners and the NHS.
It’s hard to imagine this down-to-earth Brit among the manufactured glitz of La La Land – it’s hard, too, to imagine she loved the limelight when, just starting as a jobbing actress, she began dating the megastar Tom Hiddleston. How was it suddenly becoming an A-lister’s girlfriend? I ask. Fielding grins: “I think I was extremely naive in all areas. And I didn’t have any idea what I was getting myself into, as you don’t when you’re 21. I learnt a lot from that experience.” She’ll say no more.
We return to Gresham and Fielding tells me she admires her as someone who has played the media’s institutionalised misogyny to her own advantage. “She would only have been able to get where she is by playing the game, flirting with the right people, dealing with John Baskill. But now it’s 2021; she’s got brains and she’s got power, and she’s finally getting a chance to run the show.” No more grinning and bearing it, then. You can see why that appeals to Fielding.
Series Two of This Time with Alan Partridge begins on 30 April on BBC One at 9.30pm
