Penelope Keith grimaces as she recalls that first, tentative screen entrance.

Summoning as much dignity as the circumstances will allow - much as the dreadful Margot would have done on The Good Life - she pauses for dramatic effect.

"A motor bike," she volunteers at last. "I had to come on riding a motor bike. And believe it or not, I was dressed from top to toe in black leather."

She giggles. "Mind you, someone had to ride the bike for me, because I couldn't."

It was 1970. Penelope had been cast as Lotte von Gelbstein, a glamorous German au pair to the comedian Marty Feldman in a long-forgotten sex romp called Every Home Should Have One (the Americans changed the title to Think Dirty).

It was one of a string of early screen roles (others included a sexy nurse in Carry On Doctor) for the young Miss Keith. But it was a small screen snob rather than a cinema seductress that was to make her a star. Two and a half decades after The Good Life was first screened, it is as the stuffy neighbour Margot Ledbetter that Penelope Keith is still recognised.

An association like that would hang like a millstone around the neck of many actors. Not her.

"Someone asked me recently, 'Don't you want to get away from all that?' I said, 'Get away from success? No way'."

She has, she says, a natural leaning towards comedy. "For me, the kings of my profession are the stand-up comics. I'm lucky enough to have worked with Morecambe and Wise and Les Dawson, and they were absolutely incredible. I'm at their feet. They say the clown always wants to play Hamlet. The fact is that most clowns can play Hamlet; it's all those Hamlets who want to play clowns that's the problem."

Penelope has progressed on screen from leather bike-chick to feisty middle-age - in her last sitcom, Next of Kin, she was a grandmother - but it is to her original producer that she has recently returned.

Ned Sherrin, the legendary television brain behind That Was The Week That Was, was also the man who made Every Home Should Have One, one of a slew of low-budget British comedies of the late Sixties and early Seventies.

He and Penelope have renewed their acquaintance in Good Grief, a new Keith Waterhouse play which he is directing. It arrives at the Alhambra next week as part of a short, pre-West End run.

"I play the widow of a tabloid newspaper editor," says Penelope. "It follows her life from his memorial service and for the next nine months. He had suggested before he died that she should keep a diary, and it takes the form of her speaking to him.

"It sounds more melancholy than it is. Waterhouse has done it all with great wit. And what's interesting is that she goes through lots of emotions, some joyful and some extremely angry.

"I was talking to someone recently about bereavement, and that's the way it seems to go - violent mood swings. He's captured it wonderfully."

Waterhouse, she says, "writes wonderful parts for women". This is the first of them to have come her way - though she is hardly a stranger to stage comedy.

Her casting in Alan Ayckbourn's fondly-remembered satire on family values, The Norman Conquests, launched a career which has run parallel to her television successes.

"I've been very lucky," she says. "I did The Norman Conquests and then I was cast in The Good Life, and the two things hit at the same time.

"I've spent far more of my time in the theatre, but I could flog my guts out eight times a week for 20 years on Shaftesbury Avenue, and be seen by only a tiny percentage of the people who could watch me just by turning on the television for half an hour."

Her character in Good Grief is a Lancastrian, as is her husband of 20 years, Rodney Timson. "He'll be my dialect coach," she says.

"Years ago I played Maggie Hobson in Hobson's Choice, and one of the critics wrote about my accent. Typical southerner."

Northerners, she insists, are inherently funnier than their southern counterparts. "I think it's significant that most of the really great stand-up comics are northern.

"They have an amazing native wit, as opposed to the superimposed wit that you tend to find in southern comics.

"And I like playing northern theatres. You get a marvellous feeling of community, far more so than in London. That's particularly true in the case of Keith Waterhouse and a Yorkshire audience."

It is, she says, rewarding to play to provincial audiences who "understand the culture" of a play.

"I think it was Michael Redgrave who said, 'You can fool the town with tragedy - but comedy will find you out'."

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