Gripping: Don't miss Channel 5's The Cuckoo, 'a suburban thriller'

Alongside a myriad of documentaries about air fryers (who knew there was so much to say about them?), such programmes have become a mainstay of the broadcaster’s schedule in recent months. They’ve been backed by the station’s parent company, Paramount, and the latest looks very promising indeed.

“We’re thrilled to be teaming up again with (production company) Clapperboard to bring this tense and twisty series to our viewers,” says Sebastian Cardwell, Deputy Chief Content Officer, UK at Paramount. “Equipped with a gripping script and household names Jill Halfpenny, Lee Ingleby, Claire Goose and Marjorie Yates as our lead cast, The Cuckoo is another brilliant addition to our expanding drama slate.”

Suzi McIntosh, Senior Executive Producer at Clapperboard, agrees: “I could not be more excited to be gathering such a fantastic and dynamic cast and crew to make this thriller that will keep us on the edge of our seats throughout. Watch this space, we are all in for a treat.”

Having already appeared in Channel 5’s The Drowning and The Holiday, Halfpenny should feel right at home here. She’s certainly a fan of the genre.

“That’s the fun of watching a thriller,” she claims, after being asked why we can’t get enough of them. “Nobody wants to be with the person who’s like, ‘I know exactly what happens’. The fun of it is, ‘It’s them. Oh, it’s her’. I think that’s why, as a nation, we’ve really – certainly in the last 10 years – become obsessed with thrillers.”

The star, who first came to the nation’s attention as a teenager in Byker Grove before appearing in EastEnders and Coronation Street and winning the second series of Strictly Come Dancing, loves acting in them too, although she admits they have their drawbacks.

“It’s always nice to play something that is a bit more psychologically dark. But while thrillers are fun, they’re also quite exhausting because the characters that you’re playing are usually consistently tense. You come home and you’re like, ‘Why are my shoulders by my ears?’

“You’re always holding something in energetically, trying to keep a lid on things, and that’s really, really fun to play – but it’s quite exhausting to have that lid on for 11 hours a day!”

Here, Halfpenny plays Sian, who lodges with a family struggling to make ends meet after they relocate to the countryside. She seems to be the perfect housemate, but it soon becomes clear she has a dark side.

It’s just one project in a busy year for the thespian. Her memoir, A Life Reimagined, will be published in June; it looks back on her life and details how she’s dealing with the grief of losing her partner in 2017. Until next Saturday she can also be seen starring in a revival of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey at Manchester’s Royal Exchange.

As she recently told The Stage: “Every actor wants variety.” It seems, then, that she’s living the dream.