As she turns the next page of her career, Joanna Page felt the time was right for her autobiography.
The only problem was finding the right time and place to actually write it.
The answer would prove to be a disused pub car park, or outside a cricket club in the middle of the night or even in a car in front of her own home.
But the result, as well as exhausting, has been “like a therapy session” for the Gavin and Stacey star as she looks towards a new chapter of her life.
“I love telling stories and it was very exciting thinking I’m going to write my life story because a lot of things have happened. But trying to do that while looking after four children and four guinea pigs and a hunky husband is quite hard work,” she told Behnaz Akhgar on Radio Wales.
“So at five o’clock I’ll hand the kids over to James, make myself a quick cup of tea, grab a chocolate bar and drive to a little local pub that is just waiting to change hands, so nobody is going there.
“I’ll park in the car park, think of stories and write notes until 11.30 at night when I’ll start freaking out, thinking I’m going to get attacked.
“So then I will drive to the car park of this cricket pitch closer to our house and work until about 1.30 in the morning and it’s pitch black outside. When I think about it now it’s ridiculous.
“Then I drive home, park in front of the house and then, no word of a lie, continue to work in the car because if I go back inside, [youngest child] Bo will wake up and then everyone will wake up, and I won’t be able to work at all.
“So I’ll work until five in the morning. At that point think, I’m near death and can’t go on any more. So I go inside, sleep for two hours, get up at 7 to get the kids ready for school and get on with the rest of the day with Bo. That’s where my life is at the moment.”
Her autobiography, entitled Lush, recounts her youth in a small village near Swansea, graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art [Rada] and early stage and screen performances before her big break in the Bafta-winning sitcom Gavin and Stacey.
This has led to countless TV and film roles, including romantic comedy Love Actually as well as regular presenting and, more recently, podcasts.
“It was very strange going back to the beginning. Thinking and talking of everything has been like a therapy session and quite liberating.
“But it does freak you out a bit as well, because I don’t think I’ve ever analysed myself this much before. I’m an impulsive person so to think about everything so much has been quite scary.”
Scary but perhaps inevitable given Page reveals how three fortune tellers predicted she would become a writer.
But it should be little surprise that she did not seek help from close friend and Gavin and Stacey co-creator Ruth Jones.
“She’s so busy with her own stuff I think she’d be sick to death of me asking ‘can you help me with this and that?'”
The title of her autobiography, due out in September, is synonymous with her most famous character – Stacey Shipman – but Page believes Lush also sums up her own personality.
She admits to crying “constantly” throughout filming of the final episode last year, then while watching with with her own family on Christmas Day and then being left a “wreck” after watching the documentary that followed.
“I’m just such a sentimental and emotional person anyway. My emotions are always so much on the surface that it got to the second day [of filming], I mean we were only on day two, I just started crying,” she said.
“There was so much joy and so much laughter because we all knew this will be the last time that we’re here, playing these characters in these costumes, all together, doing this story.
“You think about how far all our lives have gone. I started it when I was 29, and for something to be there in the background for the whole of your life.
“And then, even though, Ruth and James would say to us, that’s it, it’s done, you’ve still got that feeling in the back of your head, oh surely, in a few years, there might be something. But now knowing that’s never going to happen again, it’s just so sad.”
Additional reporting by Gwilym Hubbard.
