BBC1 "Film 99" Mad Cows Interview - 26 October 1999

[Film Clip]

Anna: It's a "Carry On" for 2000....

[Film Clip]

Anna: It has got a very "Carry-on-esque" feel to it.....

[Film Clip]

Jonathan Ross: You pin the Australian down perfectly.

Anna: It's very jowly. You're using, erm, it's very lazy. It's very very easy. It slips off the tongue so easily, you can just get it all the time. You could do it cos you "tawk like thart"(cockney accent). And then you've got lots of sun and you start to squint your eyes and you've got lots and lots of space and suddenly you start to use different muscles back here (points to back of jaw) and you're Australian.

[Film Clip]

JR: There's a fight scene in the movie - a funny fight scene involving some big bones....

Anna: That fight scene took like 3 days, and that dress made out of metal weighed almost half a stone and actually gave me a rash. I had a rash all over my body from that stupid silver dress.

[Film Clip of fight scene]

JR: That was a lovely baby you worked with.

Anna: 3 babies !!

JR: Oh - there were 3. They sort of juggled them ?

Anna: Triplets. I wanted to run off with them. They were beautiful. I became really, really paternal.

JR: You feel that - no not paternal !

Anna: Maternal . OK !

JR: The other side of the gender base !!

Anna: (laughs) Yeah, I became maternal. I wanted to have a baby.

[Film Clip]

JR: And is this one of these signs that will kick start your paternity career !!

Anna: Well I have to gave a bit of a man first I think or just go to the sperm bank and get the best genes.

JR: (laughs) No you don't have to use that !

Anna: Yeah. I'd like to have a man !!

[Film Clip]

JR: Was it my imagination or did your breasts change size throughout the film ?

Anna: They changed size in every scene cos when, if you're breast-feeding one breast does go bigger than the other one. And my breasts weren't big enough to be believable that I was carrying milk in them. So what you have is these that are like chicken breasts, with, I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but they had nipples that would go hard when it was cold and soft when it was warm (laughing)

JR: We have this technology ???

Anna: Yeah !! We had, we had three. You don't need to have implants, you just don't need to. It's exactly the silicon thing you put in if you have implants but you wear them on top of your breasts so what you actually see is your own breast there (pushes her own breasts together !) and you've got 3 or 2 of these things which were so heavy, and these horrible dyed-grey maternity bras, and a baby, so by the end of it I was like this hunched over thing !! But it was good - it gave me big sized breasts !!

JR: (laughs) Well you know - thank you for that !!

Anna: (laughs) That's alright ! Shame they weren't real !!

JR: No, that's fine ! I'm only looking anyway !

Anna: (laughs) Yeah !

JR: (in studio) Mad Cows is a deliberately silly film which takes a fairly broad swipe at all things stuffy and British and scores a few laughs in the process. Anna Friel, in her first major role, is better than the movie deserves and is by turns likeable and sexy as Maddy. Joanna Lumley, however, offers a watered down version of her infamous "Patsy" role from Absolutely Fabulous. Despite such stars and strong support turns from Greg Wise and Phila DeLore, the movie comes across as being too daft to really work. Although shot and edited in a frantic MTV-style, it feels curiously dated - like a swinging-60's comedy that hasn't realised that time has moved on. It's not awful, though it has its fair share of buttock-clencing moments, but neither is it especially good.