Kathy Burke's new film This Year's Love is a little cracker. When you see it, you might be forgiven for believing that (as with Tony Blair's New Labour Cabinet) London is inhabited by more Scots than you can shake a stick at - the writer/director, David Kane, is a Scot and at least three of the main characters have their roots firmly north of Hadrian's Wall. But that's not a criticism because, to be honest, it's actually quite refreshing to have a group of Scottish characters in a film and not one of them is a thuggish, drug-dealing criminal intent on smashing a pint glass into your face.
Instead, This Year's Love is an extremely funny, urban "comedy of errors" which tells the tale of six late-20-somethings coping with love and life in effortlessly trendy Camden Town. Once you've got your breath back after the deeply sensuous opening scene - which sees the camera linger on the beautiful tattoos on the actor, Douglas Henshall's body - the sheer noise of the booming, sexy Celtic music somehow lets you know that you will enjoy this.
The storyline turns on its comic head time and time again and through a series of coincidental meetings in and around Camden Town, the characters swap partners once a year until everyone has been with everyone else - giving the film an extraordinary feeling of movement. The trick is to pay attention. You might get lost in the plot and find that you're not sure whether Burke's Heathrow Airport cleaner/pub backing singer, Marey, who wonders why anyone would love her, will make up with the Scottish tattoo artist who is on the rebound from his wife. The wife in turn finds herself resisting the charms of the slightly deranged Liverpudlian who eventually latches onto Burke and the wheel turns again.
When I walk into the hotel room to meet Kathy Burke, the first thing I see is her bottom. She has her back to the door and is leaning over a table signing a few autographs for the photographers. I'm smiling even before we begin. She turns to shake my hand with a "How are you darlin'?" greeting and lights up the first of a series of cigarettes.
"The thing about Marey," she says, "is that she's quite self-deprecating. It's a real lack of confidence, it's the fact that she doesn't ever expect anything to work for her. When I got the script, I felt it just needed more of a lack of confidence in her part and I said to Davy (the writer/director) `don't be shy of her putting herself down'.
"I think a lot of people have been through that really. I recognised it totally, when you can't understand why somebody's with you. I think basically she wants an old-fashioned relationship. You know, you could spend all this time looking, it's like that old thing, like that Liza Minelli song The Boy Next Door and that person could have been in front of you for years, but you've just never seen it."
The fact that the characters are approaching 30 and still haven't "made it" - and aren't likely to either - was important for Burke. The 1980s were all about get rich quick, but not all of Thatcher's children bought into the dream or were able to pull it off: "I think the 1980s were a bit of a fuck up time really and I just think it buggered up a lot of people. I think a lot of people weren't ready to take the bull by the horns."
In truth, this film doesn't make it any less difficult to determine what type of actress Kathy Burke is. Just as we got to know her as the battered wife in Gary Oldman's semi-autobiographical Nil by Mouth, so too she is the pinkhaired fluff of the BBC's new comedy Gimme Gimme and the colourless sister to Meryl Streep in last year's Dancing at Lughnasa. That role, she admits, was her chance to "play Irish" and give her aunties and godparents the opportunity to see a film in which she wasn't battered or beaten up. Her father was born in Galway and her mother in Cork, and even though both are dead, Lughnasa was for them too.
All these role, she says, are her attempt to "take people by surprise and not do what's expected." So, just as Gimme Gimme is her chance to give the audience "a bit of filth," Lughnasa was Burke playing a "pleasant woman" instead of the "monster" we had grown used to.
Burke was born in north London and still lives, for the time being at least, close to where she grew up on the Essex road. She is soon to move to Highbury which, depending on where you live on the Hill, is either TV researcher meets designer of ludicrously expensive Chinese silk cushions or down-at-heel middle-class divorcee struggling to raise pretentious 13-yearold in the shadow of ugly West Stand of Arsenal Football Stadium. Thankfully she doesn't fit into either category.
No matter which part of the city she lives in, Burke's enormous energy and optimism means she is convinced London is just a series of opportunities waiting to happen: "You get that in London, I mean boroughs in London are like little villages really, little towns".