Brenda, thank you so much for coming in.

Thanks Jonathan

My two favourite, very very funny scenes in [the film] both involve you. The first is when you try marijuana for the first time.

I beg your pardon.....

That you're growing, in the movie

I don't know what you're talking about, I deny it.

I want to know whether you actually inhaled the lot.

I can't remember. (laughter)

Were they real marijuana plants they used in the film?

Oh some of them were, sort of delivered under police escort, they had to get special dispensation from the Home Office (laughter) but a lot of them, of course, were expertly made...

And having been around film crews in the past, would I be right in thinking that maybe some of them disappeared?

Oh probably they did, I didn't count them. In the scene I had one of those pretend plants in my handbag, and I was showing it to people and some of them thought it was real.

That's my other favourite, where you're all dressed up like a character out of "Shaft" or something, and you're trying to find a dealer to buy some of the successfully harvested crop of marijuana. The outfit you're wearing is quite something isn't it?

It's quite fetching... I think it's part of her trousseau when she got married. Before we did that scene I was introduced to about 40 extras in the pub and I couldn't remember who they all were! I mean it's a busy day in Portobello Road, everyone's minding their own business, doing their shopping and these extras were dispersed into the crowd.

So you were just approaching strangers...

(Laughter) I nearly scored a couple of times...

Did any of them recognise you or just thought you were an actress who had fallen on hard times?

Well I overhead in one of the shops, "Brenda Blethyn is out there selling drugs!" (laughter)

Let me ask you about the actual feel of the film and the tone of the film because it's a modern movie, but it harps back to the kind of gentle comedy of the Ealing films. And of course there will be parallels drawn I believe between this and "Whisky Galore", which is kind of like ganja galore I guess...

No, I mean it all started when Mark Crowdy was talking to somebody in Los Angeles and somebody mentioned apropos of nothing that really good marijuana was more valuable than gold, and he thought, oh, maybe that would make an interesting story. He grew up in Cornwall, he knew lots of interesting characters there so that kind of inspired him to write. Craig Ferguson wrote it, did the script with Mark, and when I first met them which was ages ago, a year before we started it, I'd read the script and I thought it was funny but I thought it had to be done for real. Otherwise if it was slapstick it just wouldn't work. It had to come from some sense of reality and I think that's why there's lots of comparisons made to those sort of Ealing comedies, "Whisky Galore", because the situation is rather bizarre, but the playing is real.