A pushchair appears with Jessica Stevenson behind it. I've been waiting outside a west London pub. Sorry, she says, terrible day, disaster with the car, child-minding arrangements up the spout. Not to worry, I say, I adore babies. Well, I don't mind them. Waaaaaaaah! screams the baby. We head for the park. It's brass monkeys out there.

Aaah, lovely baby, I say to Stevenson. What's her name? Stevenson and pushchair pull up sharp. "I'm sorry," she says, "I don't do that. You know, I don't go there. Private life, keep it private, sorry. I don't mean to get off on the wrong footing, and I'll answer anything. Anything ."

"Uhuh ... how old is, erm, it?" She apologises again. "Sorry, I justdon't, you know."

It feels unreal, like an episode of Spaced. In Spaced, which she co-wrote, she played a slacker who occasionally taps away at an archaic electric typewriter and declares herself a writer-journalist. It is great comedy - the surrealism of The Young Ones married to the domesticity of Man About The House sprinkled with the heightened reality of Abigail's Party. It tapped into a zeitgeist where twenty-somethings were overgrown kids; stoners and wasters with voracious appetites for PlayStation, pornography and the Territorial Army.

If Daisy, her character in Spaced, had become a famous writer, I could imagine her telling a journalist, "Sorry, kids are off limits." Daisy is a girl-woman desperate to get it right. When she's interviewed for the postfeminist fashion mag Flaps, she tries to play it cool but screws up, giving the editor a V-for-victory sign and saying Girl Power! "I like your shoes," she tells another woman. "Patrick Cox's," the woman answers. "Oh, you borrowed them?" Daisy says. "Small feet for a bloke."

After a protracted silence, Stevenson divulges the baby's name - but we'll call her Baby. "You can say I'm married with two children," she says. "Have you got any, erm, you know, children?" she asks sheepishly. Maybe, I say, petulantly. Then she comes out with something that convinces me we're being secretly filmed for a reality satire about celebrity and the media. "So, erm, how tiny are your tinies?" she mutters out of the corner of her mouth.

Baby is crying. Stevenson is trying to calm her. It's just that little bit too real for reality TV. It's beginning to get dark, the photographer wants to take his pictures. Stevenson instantly takes control, suggesting a few shots. She stops, and laughs, embarrassed. "I'm so bossy. I suddenly become an expert on something I know nothing of. If I had a tattoo on my inside lip, it would read 'bullshit hole'."

We retreat first to a cafe, and then Stevenson suggests a space round the back where old folk hang out. She talks about her past, growing up in Brighton and then as a teenager in London. Even at primary school she liked to do a turn - they had fantastic music and drama facilities, and inspiring teachers. She calls her parents working-class hippies. Her mother is a special needs teacher and her father a carpenter. She joined the National Youth Theatre and after A-levels left school to act.

Stevenson is about to star in a new TV series, According To Bex. Bex is a funny, semi-glamorous but down-to-earth PA to a pompous boss who thinks he's something big in marketing.

She doesn't look like she did on Spaced, even less like she did as Cheryl, the dumpy girl next door in The Royle Family. As Cheryl, she said hardly anything, and was there largely as the butt of Jim's caustic one-liners. ("You don't want to be missing your tea, Cheryl. You'll be wasting away.") There was something so melancholy and serious about Cheryl. Daisy was uncomfortable with her body, too. Even in the new series, Stevenson seems to be carrying old baggage - we learn that Bex was known as Specs Fatswell at school.

She's not having any of that line of argument. "I hate that. I just think it's negative. I never did that in Spaced. That wasn't a Spaced thing." Look, I say, I watched the first series yesterday and I even wrote down this quote from it, "Come on, Daisy, stop feeling like a big fat ugly failure."

Ah, that was written by Simon Pegg (her co-star and co-writer), nothing to do with her. "It's a joke on his character rather than a comment on my size or shape. His character was sardonic, grumpy. Certainly it was never my intention to write someone who was down on themselves because I don't think that is particularly interesting. I tried to make Daisy forward-thinking and positive. She didn't dwell on things, she just acted. She's a postmodern heroine."

In her early 20s, just like Daisy, Stevenson bought herself an electric typewriter to show the world she was serious about her writing. At the time, she was living in a friend's flat, dossing on the floor, trying to be an artist, grateful for any attention. "My romantic image, you know. When you've got an idea about yourself as a struggling artist, if nobody actually notices then it is not as effective."

She's 32 now and says she's changed in the past few years. Her 20s seemed so me-me-me-me and looking back she feels as if she consumed life rather than lived it. Stevenson says people are constantly being sold things they don't need to distract them from the fact that they haven't got what they really need. Friendship, intimacy, love. "In a very cynical way, I think they want us to stay single and unhappy for as long as possible, then they can sell us shit to make ourselves feel better, know what I mean?"

Who are "they"? You know, she says. The advertisers, big business, the money-makers."They have control over our aspirations: what we think we should want and what we think we should be."

It's time for Stevenson to collect her boy from primary school. I could always walk with her, she says, so long as I don't identify her son.

She says she'd like to make a distinction between popular culture - music, movies, graphic novels - which she loves, and crappy commodities, which she doesn't. "Art and culture are the lifeblood of human existence in my opinion. Obviously I'm pretty average in terms of my experience; I didn't go on to further education, but I watched film and TV and listened to music and I am getting into literature. I'm reading classic poetry partly because I've got a chip on my shoulder and also partly because I can appreciate it more than I could when I did A-levels."

The more she walks, the more she relaxes. The colder it gets, the warmer she becomes. We're bantering, chatting, arguing the toss. Even Baby seems at peace. She quotes me some Yeats. "'The best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.' There you go. I may have misquoted it. It's from The Second Coming, you'll like it."

Why do the best lack conviction?

"He's saying that we've become so powerless in this monstrous machine that we come to realise we cannot effect any change, whereas the worst feel that by shouting or screaming or by ... "

She goes off to get her son, a lovely curly-haired creature, and leaves me standing against a school wall. Mums and pushchairs swarm out of the school gates. "It's like schools of fish," she says.

I tell her that I like her as Bex and think the programme might have been better if she'd written it. The problem is that it's trying to be both mainstream and wacky. At times, Stevenson talks straight to camera like a stand-up, and mock vox pops break in.

"That was my fear. It may be too edgy for people who want the mainstream."

I tell her she reminds me of Samantha Fox as Bex. She grins. "That is such a compliment. I'm so glad you said Sam Fox. That's really perfect."

Did it get to you being cast as the perennial fatty? Suddenly it all pours out."Actually, I have to say that after three series of the Royle Family, on some deep level, it does get to you. After a while of taking those beatings, especially after you feel you've left all that behind, you think you can handle it, then you think blimey! God! Obviously it's just a job and it's acting and it's not real, but it does take its toll. It does. It did."

Was she regarded as a fattie? "No!" she says incisively. She softens. "Yes! Yes, I was." She laughs. Stevenson has a lovely no-no-yes way of conceding.

It's still freezing and we're heading off to a party for the kids. She talks politics, saying she finds it amazing that British socialists went out to fight in the Spanish civil war. "The idea that anybody in this culture would have the time and inclination to go and fight an idealistic war on behalf of another country without being paid to do so in this generation is just unthinkable. What's changed?"

She returns to that Yeats quote. "I suppose the Yeats thing ties in with the idea of being disillusioned. After the American election you feel so defeated, you start to think you're living under some kind of tyranny in the 53rd state of America, and you think, well, how can I be political in a climate like this? Where do I go to be political? What party do I join?"

We've arrived at the party. This is where I leave. She stands on the pavement still thinking about idealism and social change. I tell her I think the Yeats quote is rubbish - so despairing and defeatist. What is the point if you don't scream about the bad stuff? Her face lights up. Yeah, she says, I know what you mean. "Yeah, rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Taken From: angelmagazine.co.uk