But not only did Monica Dolan earn two RTS Award nominations for such polar opposite performances – Lead Actor for Jo Hamilton in Mr Bates vs The Post Office and Supporting Actor for Ann Branson in Sherwood – it turns out that she filmed them at the same time.

Ahead of the Awards, Dolan tells me that an overlap in the productions caused a bit of a “logistical conundrum.” There was one Sunday night when she wrapped filming Mr Bates in Kent at 8.00pm, only to hop into a minivan that was waiting to drive her up to Skegness – via her home to pick up Velma, her Siberian husky – to shoot Sherwood in the morning.

“It was like being on The Krypton Factor,” she says, referring to the classic British gameshow that tested both the intelligence and physical stamina of its contestants. If this sounds overblown, imagine embodying the suffering of a subpostmaster at the hands of a ruthless Horizon IT helpline that’s blaming them for shortfalls caused by its own faulty accounting software. Then imagine, the very next day, having to stride into a fictional Nottingham turf war that’s been re-ignited by your ‘son’s’ senseless murder, and when a rival crime family refuses to help you avenge that murder, launching into a menacing monologue about parsnips.

Dolan says the biggest challenge was actually the preparation, especially of Ann Branson’s Nottingham accent, given that her mouth had moulded to Jo Hamilton’s Hampshire tones. “Nottingham’s a pretty difficult accent anyway,” she explains. “You think it’s slightly Brummy but it’s so in the middle of everywhere that it’s got sounds from all over the place.”

What made it even more difficult was that she usually relies on staying in her character’s accent for the entirety of a production.

This is not the same as staying in character, she specifies. “It’s actually a really technical thing. When I'm speaking as me, I use different muscles and my tongue’s going in different places in my mouth. It’s a bit like having a stretch before you go for a run – you just want to keep those muscles alive. And sometimes it might be a surprise that they're ready for you, so you have to be ready to just do it.”

Some things, however, required more than lingual flexibility. “God, my agent Will said that he’d never had so many conversations about hair!” Alas her chameleonic range has its limits, so they were forced to keep Jo’s blonde locks and settled on a look for Ann that she likens to “Kim Wilde in her gardening programme phase.”

“We didn't make her hair as curly [as Jo’s] and darkened the roots a bit, and just generally made her look a bit more… unkempt.”

She laughs here, probably in part at the frivolousness of it all. Actors are often keen to inflate the extremity of their processes, especially during awards season, but Dolan is noticeably understated.

It’s this humility that Eddie Marsan, who played the deluded, debt-ridden thief to Dolan’s long-suffering wife in The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe, once cited as the basis of her ability. “She disappears,” he told The Guardian, “because she’s not vain in any sense. She loses herself, but not in an indulgent way.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking that ‘disappearing’ into a role would require extraordinary levels of commitment, as certain so-called ‘method actors’ have won plaudits, media attention – and perhaps a little notoriety – for staying in character throughout their productions, no matter how inconvenient. Dolan’s methods, however, are typically considerate, and practical. “Staying in character can be a bit of an imposition on the other actors,” she says, but also: “there’s quite a lot of downtime, and [physically] you’re also in a different place […] It’d be quite hard to keep your character up when you’re going to the loo or getting your lunch!”

It's especially hard, impossible even, to “keep your character up” when you’re filming two different series at the same time. And yet Dolan disappeared into Mr Bates vs The Post Office – and her real-life character of Jo Hamilton – so effectively that she played a vital role in humanising what was, at least on the surface, a humdrum scandal about a seemingly benign institution with a faceless antagonist: some faulty IT software.

The series struck such a nerve, and ignited such public outrage, that it even forced the government to pass a law that exonerated all the wrongly accused subpostmasters. And yet when I ask Dolan if, because of this uncommonly tangible impact for a drama, it was one of the most rewarding jobs she’s had, her answer was unexpectedly self-effacing.

“When you're actually working on something, how it's going to be received is sort of none of your business. If you're thinking too much about that, then you're probably not going to do it [justice]. You get what they call ‘third eye’, where you're looking at yourself. So concentrating on having a good character and a good story is the really rewarding thing, and working with actors that you love.”

Perhaps it’s this lack of a ‘third eye’ that allowed her to disappear. Although she does add that she was “very, very proud of the audience for being that angry, and being unanimous.”

The reason for this unanimous anger, she believes, is simple. “Money is really relatable. I know that we don't like to talk about it, but everyone's got some kind of relationship with it.” She compares it to one of her favourite plays, The Voysey Inheritance by Harley Granville Barker. “It's all about money, and it's all about love. And really, what else is there?”

Dolan’s always armed with a theatrical reference, and this love for the stage has deep roots. She points to her first part in a school play, as a librarian in Ernie’s Incredible Hallucinations, as the moment she found her calling. She jokingly admits to chasing “that dangerous feeling of approval” ever since.

What she actually lives for is the theatre’s sense of communion. “I remember when I was doing this production of Jane Eyre. One time we had a load of school kids in, and at the point where Jane and Mr Rochester kiss, they all breathed in at the same time.”

TV might delay this kind of involuntary response, but it is no less real. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one nervously laughing whenever Dolan stepped on screen as Ann Branson in Sherwood and bulldozed anyone who stood in her way. This even included Lorraine Ashbourne’s Daphne Sparrow, another matriarch of a drug-dealing family. Daphne and the Sparrows were first introduced in series one, but they take centre stage in the second after Daphne's youngest son Ronan (Bill Jones) witnesses the murder of Ann’s son Nicky. It's Daphne who gets an earful from Ann when she dares resist her demand for help in avenging her son's murder. “Parsnips, lovely, how will you do them? Roast with a bit of honey?”

It's apt here that Ann's wickedly funny lines came from the pen of a playwright. But what Dolan “absolutely loved” about James Graham’s writing, she says, was that he “didn’t overwrite her.”

These bizarre segues about parsnips all add up to a character who’s “aggressively oblique,” which obviously put more of the onus on her to interrogate the character. “But,” she says, “that’s the bit I love.”

Good scriptwriting, she believes, is as much about what a character doesn’t say, or the little inconsistencies in what they say or do that at first glance she “would quite like them to cut.”

“I always stop myself, because usually if there’s an inconsistent bit, everything else that the character is doing is trying to cover that up.”

In that sense, Graham is a realist. “In life we very rarely say what we actually mean. People only really do it in dramas!”

So what is it that really drives the oblique Ann Branson? Apparently the answers lie in another work of theatre.

“I really made someone laugh yesterday because I said Daphne and Ann are just like Jean Valjean and Javert in Les Misérables!” she says. For those unfamiliar with Victor Hugo’s epic, Jean is the ex-convict at its centre. Despite his criminal past, Jean aspires to a new life of virtue only to be pursued by Javert, a righteous police inspector who does not believe in redemption. Dolan does note the glaring difference here: Ann Branson holds fast to the strictly illegal code of Nottingham drug cartels. But it is this code that Daphne is desperately trying to leave behind, so her analogy goes some way toward capturing their dynamic in all its moral complexity.

Dolan tells me that her and Ashbourne had a lot of fun playing the cat-and-mouse game that ensued. Especially scenes like their confrontation in a pub, whereby Daphne, who has been enlisted by the police and is wearing a wire, asks Ann to fess up to murdering the Bottomleys. At the last minute, Anne is warned off doing so by her man on the inside, DI Marcus Clarke (Jorden Myrie).

Why are scenes like these so fun to play? “Because you have to hide so much,” she says. “And also the you're very, very complicit with the audience, because they know the rest of the story.”

At this point, however, it was time we cut to The Chase. As well as starring in two of 2024’s most watched dramas, Dolan, a self-proclaimed “enormous fan” of the ITV quiz show, finally fulfilled her dream of appearing on the programme at the top of the year.

She says her love affair with The Chase began in lockdown. Not only did it form an integral part of her daily routine, it also solved the universal pandemic problem of having nothing to talk about on the phone with her mum, who was also in isolation.

Her obsession became a well-known fact among her fellow actors. She tells me she once found herself at a party where two of her heroes, Chasers ‘The Beast’ and ‘The Governess’, turned up, and her friends had to prod her into meeting them. “I got my photo taken, which I think was my cover photo on my Facebook for quite a while,” she admits.

But then, in January 2024, she went one better and took them on in a celebrity special. And yes, she even got Bradley Walsh to give her mum a shout out.

How did she do? “I was extremely disappointed with my cash builder,” she says. “I thought my questions were hard, and the rest of my team thought so too…”

She pauses, weighing up what turns out to be a major scoop. “I don’t know, I probably shouldn't say, but they give you a little phone call test the night before. And I wish that I hadn't got so many of those right, because I think they [consequently] made my questions quite hard. That's my story anyway!”

It’s the smallest of brags, but Dolan, as a multi-RTS Award nominee, has earned a bit of pride.