Arabella Weir: Someone up there likes me

Arabella Weir is funny. She's talented. She's been successful as both an actress and as the author of Does My Bum Look Big in This? You'd never guess that behind the smiles lies a mass of neuroses. But once you know about her parents...

The day before I'm due to meet Arabella Weir I discover a number of utterly alarming facts: 1) she lives round the corner from me; 2) her child has just started at the state primary school my own son goes to; and 3) she's been made co-chair of the school's PTA, which means, probably, that she'll try to rope me in to putting up bunting in the halls at the weekends and scouring the stinky loos on "Make and Mend Day" and all that. (Look, my kid is a lot older than hers, so I've done my bunting and loo stints, all right.)

I don't know why I didn't know any of this about Arabella before. I don't know why I've never clocked her or her bum, which is possibly now a celebrity in its own right and, for all I know, is about to start its own column in Heat. (Maybe it could do book reviews?) But the most alarming thing about all this is: what if she's a right old cow-face and I say as much? Will she rope me into double bunting duty? Get me at the school gate? Pull my hair and snatch my Beyblades? She looks bloody strong. Oh, hell.

Annoyingly, considering she lives just two roads down from me – actually, now I think about it, it's not that annoying, and I could do with the exercise – I'm asked to meet Arabella in central London, in a Starbucks on Wardour Street, because she's got a voice-over to do in the area at lunchtime. (Obviously, it's the one Mariella Frostrup allowed to get away.)

Arabella arrives accompanied by a divine turquoise handbag – "divine handbag, Arabella" – and a new hairdo which, she says, her friends say makes her look like Brian May. I say her friends don't know what they're talking about. It's a super hairdo, Arabella. (I think I even add: "I wish I had hair like yours, Arabella." I could give Mr Bashir a masterclass in full-blown creepiness. What I don't know about creepiness just isn't worth knowing.)

I pay for our coffees. "My treat, Arabella." She is wearing an M&S top – "nice top, Arabella" – teamed with black trousers in which "your bum does not look big at all, Arabella". I ask if she'll still only have sex with the light off. "I'm not answering that question!" she cries. I can see, now, that this was a complete lapse of judgement on my part. Arabella, if you are reading this, I would just like to say such remarks are, actually, wholly unlike me. I must have been having a funny turn. PMT?

Arabella Weir, now in her early forties, with the lovely bag and the totally un-Brian Mayish hairdo. ("It's more Rebecca from Cheers, Arabella!") Let's see. How to sum her up. Well, she's the one who started off as a "proper actress" appearing in The Bill and the like – "I played a junkie threatening to set fire to herself. I got to ride in a fire engine" – before veering off into comedy and The Fast Show, where she created those wonderful self-explanatory characters Pushy Saleswoman, Different With Boys and, most famously, Insecure Woman, whose obsession with her backside spun off into the mega-selling novel Does My Bum Look Big in This? ("A riotous read... right up my street", Bum Correspondent, Heat).

Arabella's latest project, aside from washing school windows on Make and Mend Day ("Well, I've agreed to do the windows I can reach...") is Posh Nosh, her TV take on the absolute banality of cookery programmes, with Richard E Grant. Arabella plays his deluded wife, Minty, who all her life has wanted to "bring extraordinary food to ordinary people".

I tell Arabella that I particularly adore Minty's obsession with organic produce, and the line: "Take your organic, unsalted butter, which is organic, and place it in an organic bowl..." I then tell her I purchased some organic honey the other day, and now it's worrying me. How can you be 100 per cent sure where the bees go? How can you be sure a naughty little teenage bee doesn't slip out to meet up with some similarly juvenile mates in a GM field six miles down the road? "Perhaps they are kept in a big cage," suggests Arabella. What, I say, battery bees? Is that allowed? We're not sure. We are probably rubbish foodies. Arabella, certainly, has never bought into the ultra-gourmet world "of monkfish, and where to source crème fraîche".

Still, food and weight are her twin obsessions and have been, more or less, from the word go. Arabella was not a thin child, a fact that seems to have horrified her parents to a rather extraordinary degree. Indeed, when Arabella was as young as eight, her mother, Alison, would announce at dinners: "Arabella cannot have potatoes. She is too fat." Her father is Sir Michael Weir, a former British ambassador in Cairo, among other far-flung appointments. He was, she says, "a rather glamorous Sean Connery/Simon Templar figure" who, after his divorce from Alison when Arabella was 11, went to New York, where he was continually surrounded by gorgeous women. He did little to offset such belittlement. "I always felt he wanted a slimmer, prettier daughter. I felt I let him down." Recently, Arabella and her father did one of those "relative values" pieces in which he remarked: "I still think Arabella could lose more weight." Stunningly sensitive or what? And it's not as if Arabella was ever sensationally obese. "I was big, but not Hattie Jacques big."

Why, I ask, did your weight horrify them so? "They wanted me to be pretty," she says. Why? "To stop me being noticed in a bad way. Everyone wants their kid to fit in. You want them to be unusual and interesting and special, but you don't want them to get noticed for red hair or glasses or whatever it is." Do pretty women have better lives? "Initially, I suppose. You get a better start. But while I didn't like my own body I never had that thing of, 'Ohh, lucky Cindy Crawford.' I always knew it was genetic and if it wasn't genetic it was an enormous amount of hard work, living in a gym, swimming all day and only eating rice cakes. Courteney Cox must never eat. She is whatever age she is – 38? – so she is in the right age-group for storing everything she eats. She must spend every waking moment going, 'Well, I won't have that, and I'll go to that birthday dinner, but I won't have a starter...'"

Did you only ever feel loved conditionally by your parents? "Yes. But, then, don't all children of Scottish Presbyterian parents?" Can you recall ever receiving praise? Long pause. "I was a good swimmer," she finally announces. "They were proud of that."

I tell her I'm reminded of Alan Bennett's remark about Philip Larkin's poem This Be the Verse, the one that starts: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad." According to Bennett, if they hadn't fucked him up, Larkin would have had nothing to write about, and then he'd have been really fucked. She says yes, she can see this is true in her case. "My sister says: what would you write about if you didn't write about that all the time? But in your fantasy, especially when you are younger and unhappy, you think: all I want is a mum who does fish fingers and is completely ordinary."

Alison Weir, a clever and beautiful woman by all accounts, was never ordinary. Although Arabella rather appreciates her now – "a strong, brave, independent, remarkable person" – this was no consolation when she was little and would ask what was for supper. "How the fuck should I know?" her mother would reply.

Arabella once wrote a piece about her mother that included the following paragraph: "I could probably get Esther Rantzen to investigate lesser crimes than those perpetrated by my mother... when your mother really does come down to breakfast wearing a Mary Quant scalloped-edge towelling kaftan in bright orange, smoking a joint and swearing like a trooper, and really does try to talk to your friends about the importance of a new book about eunuchs, and really does refer to other people as petit bourgeois half-wits for hanging net curtains, then you do positively ache for a Fairy Liquid mum." Arabella's mother, by the way, is still quite interested in Arabella's size. "She'll make remarks on the calorific content of chocolate when I'm halfway though a Twix."

Of course, all this screwed up Arabella's relationship with food. "I've done things like eaten two packets of biscuits knowing that all the while I didn't want them. Eating the whole lot is ridiculously self-destructive. It's about not liking yourself, not accepting yourself, wanting to hurt yourself. It's fantastically self-fulfilling because you think: I've just eaten two packets of biscuits, so I'm a disgusting person, and there is no point in me getting better because I'm the sort of person who eats two packets of biscuits."

How do you break the cycle? For her, she says, it was therapy. Group therapy, possibly Jungian group therapy. "I don't really know. I'm not very good on theories. Just put 'group'." And what did you learn? "The aim of therapy is accepting who you are and not compromising. I had to stop thinking that the only way I would be accepted was trying to be what I imagined other people wanted. The only chance you have in life is finding out who you are, which is pretty difficult anyway, and then thinking, 'OK, this is who I am, and I'm sticking with it.' I'm not going to go, 'He likes women who wear yellow sweaters and mini-skirts, so I'll do that.' You have to nail your colours to the mast about who you are." Do you have a strong sense of who you are now? "Very." Sum yourself up. "Opinionated, bullish, funny, loyal, neurotic, whatever that means. It's a bit of a catch-all, but I do think I'm fairly neurotic."

She says she never expected to have children of her own. Actually, no, that's not quite true. She never expected to meet a man with whom she would want children. She's dated some terrible "tossers" in her time, one of whom was "a complete and total pig" who, after she called things off, "issued several writs for the return of 'unspecified gifts'. I think he'd once bought me a suede jacket." But then, six years ago, along came a young chap (he's 12 years her junior) called Jeremy to decorate her house, and within a week he'd moved in. Bloody hell, I say, I hope you got a discount. She says Jeremy has since completed his PhD and is now a research scientist at the Natural History Museum. His speciality is fish parasites. Do you... um... take an interest in his work? "I... um... know not to eat sushi." Are the kids – Archie, three, and Isabella, five – fussy eaters? Put it this way, she says: "I wouldn't go home tonight and do a mushroom risotto just for the hell of it."

Now she has to go. That voice-over. "I'm going to get you washing those windows," she calls, as she races up the road. "You can count on me," I lie. Well, I thought I was lying, but Arabella, aside from having a super hairdo, and not having the huge arse she thinks she has, still looks bloody strong. I've bought the J-Cloths already.

'Posh Nosh' is on BBC2 on Tuesdays at 9.50pm