Sian Gibson: ‘I don’t feel famous at all. I can still pretty much go unnoticed’

Sian Gibson burst on to the comedy scene in 2015 in Peter Kay’s Car Share, the sitcom she co-wrote with Kay about two supermarket workers who become friends while sharing a car to work. After two series and two final specials, she co-wrote and starred in the hit BBC TV series The Power of Parker, playing Kath, a care home worker who is sleeping with the owner of an electrical shop. Now the show is back for a second series, set in 1992. Gibson is married to Ian, a gas fitter, and lives in north Wales, near where she grew up.

Pot noodles, shell suits, Kilroy, power walking… Did you and your co-writer Paul Coleman have fun coming up with all the early 90s references you put in The Power of Parker?

Yes! I love the 90s. The soundtrack was really important to us, and I spent hours down YouTube rabbit holes watching Milli Vanilli videos. It’s such a brilliant era, and it’s awfully depressing to know it was 30 years ago. In 1992, when series two is set, I was doing my A-levels, listening to Pearl Jam and thinking the world was my oyster. But when women like my mum were middle-aged in the 1990s, it was bubble perms and BHS elasticated trousers.

Do you think things have changed for women since then?

I feel a lot of women, back then, raised their family and then gave up. Women in their 40s and 50s aren’t like that any more. But we do feel invisible. As one of the characters in the show says: “If a middle-aged woman puts a pair of marigolds on, she could rob a bank and no one would even notice.”

Women suffer from blatant sexism in the show. Have you experienced sexism in your own career?

I worked in offices in the 1990s and 2000s and definitely the sexism was horrendous. The comments, the constant belittling, the suggestion that a woman couldn’t do a man’s job… I don’t know what it would be like in an office environment now but I don’t think that much has changed really. It’s just that people will tag on “I’m not allowed to say that now” at the end of the sentence.

Has that been your experience of the TV industry, too?

I’ve been very lucky in the [acting] jobs I’ve done. I’ve worked with a lot of very respectful men – and the ones who haven’t been, I wouldn’t mention. I still think it’s hard being a mum and wanting to be really successful in your career. There’s this constant juggle that, in my case, will always bring me back to the home and not being able to just go off and work all the hours because you’ve got responsibilities.

You’re 48 and have a 13-year-old daughter. Many women – myself included – find going through menopause with a teenager in the house quite hard. How’s it going for you?

It’s a really weird stage in life, isn’t it? The rows in this house are ridiculous. My daughter is brilliant, but everything’s a battle. It’s just so hard. My insides are dying and hers are just kick-starting. There’s a lot of how I feel at the moment, going through the menopause, in series two of The Power of Parker… There are days when I don’t know what I’m doing, and there are days when I’m really upset and angry. In my head, my character, Kath, does what she does in this series because she’s menopausal – and she doesn’t know what she wants, how she feels. Now, among all my friends, the menopause is all we talk about, but in the 90s, women my age would never mention it, or talk about how they were feeling.

You started out as an actor but were working in a call centre when the first series of Car Share was broadcast. Why?

I got an agent straight after university, where I did a HND in Media Performance along with Peter Kay. I’m short and I used to look young and be able to play young parts. Then I hit 30 and had to stop that. I started temping in a bank. Peter was always really supportive and put me in his stuff, but I wasn’t getting much else. One day, I found myself thinking: I haven’t had an audition or casting call for so long, and I looked at my agent’s website and I wasn’t on it any more. I thought: that’s sad. But I accepted it. I’d always wanted to act but I wasn’t from an acting family. My dad was a builder, and my mum had worked in a factory. So I got married and was working in a call centre in north Wales when I had my daughter.

And then Peter contacted you about Car Share.

As soon as I read his email, I messaged him back to say “I am Kayleigh”, because she is very similar to me. So similar that when we improvised in the first series, I’d just forget we were filming and start talking about myself, ex-boyfriends and people I was at school with. A lot of those improvisations made it into the final script, and no one notices where Kayleigh ends and Sian begins – except people from school, who contacted me because I’d said their actual names.

Did you expect it to be such a hit?

After we had finished filming, I went back to the call centre part-time. I thought the show was alright but I didn’t think it was going to take off the way it did. Which is stupid, because Peter Kay was in it and so of course everyone was going to watch it.

It wasn’t just Peter Kay that made the show take off, though.

Aww... Yes. It was the red Fiat.

You won a Bafta for the Car Share script and were nominated for your performance. How did it feel to suddenly become quite famous?

I don’t feel famous at all. I can still pretty much go unnoticed on the street – it’s surprising how different I look when I haven’t brushed my hair, because all my characters have lots of slap and hair extensions. But Car Share changed my life completely, for the better. I’ll always be grateful to it for that. It’s given me more belief in myself. It’s given me a job that I love. And I now have the luxury of writing my own series and getting it made, which I know, without Car Share, would never have happened.

The Power of Parker is on BBC One and BBC iPlayer

Photograph by David Reiss