Ashley Jensen

In Extras (2005), Maggie Jacobs keeps turning up for acting work while wondering whether she is wasting her life. Ashley Jensen gives that worry enough weight to make the next stretch of waiting difficult to laugh off. She is funny, but she also makes continued effort seem costly, without making Maggie noble for enduring it. We were saddened by how familiar she made that fear of getting nowhere feel. The performance gives us a reason to care about someone whom a harsher comedy might have left as the joke.

That breakthrough followed Scottish theatre and small British television parts, and led to Christina McKinney in Ugly Betty (2006). The character’s nationality was rewritten to accommodate Jensen’s Scottish accent, a useful indication that the voice was worth keeping. Later came detective leads: the title role in Agatha Raisin (2014), then DI Ruth Calder in Shetland (from 2023). These parts move her from the ensemble towards the centre of a programme. For us, though, Extras remains the clearest reason to seek her out.

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant give Maggie’s uncertainty a little space, and Jensen uses it without announcing that the comedy has become serious. Her work makes the programme’s repeated embarrassments harder to dismiss as a succession of mishaps. It matters that the people being humiliated have already spent so much time being overlooked. The celebrity sketches can feel slight, and the series is not always as attentive to disappointment as it is when Maggie is present. Jensen cannot make every sketch substantial, but her scenes give us something to remember besides who appeared and what went wrong.

We would start with Extras, with a little space between episodes if the repeated humiliations begin to wear. It is a strong introduction to Jensen because she has enough to do beyond getting the next laugh, and enough time for us to notice. Anyone giving her another guileless character should also give that character something to lose.