Brookside star Claire Sweeney would love part in new Grange Hill film - just not as a maths teacher
21.01.2022 - 18:51
/ dailyrecord.co.uk
Claire Sweeney would love to team up with her old Brookside boss Sir Phil Redmond to play a teacher in the new Grange Hill movie.
But the 50-year old joked she couldn’t teach maths after a “horrendous” time home schooling her seven-year-old son Jaxon.
Playing Lindsey Corkhill in the Liverpool-based soap made her a household name but after finishing runner-up in the first Celebrity Big Brother in 2001 she’s become a mainstay of British musical theatre.
She said: “I would like to get back on telly but it’s just getting the opportunities. Being in Grange Hill would be good but I’d have to be a drama or art teacher.
“It wouldn’t be maths after my homeschooling. It was horrendous. It was the only time me and my son argued and he’s only seven.
“He said, ‘Mummy you’re really good at most things but you just can’t do maths can you?’I said, ‘I can’t argue with that, son’. But we got through it.”
In fact, the self-confessed workaholic who spends much of the year on tour thoroughly enjoyed the enforced stay at home in 2020 because of the pandemic.
Claire, who is single, said: “It was a double-edged sword. I’m a mum and I’ve never spent that much time with my son without having to go off somewhere and work, so that was lovely. At the height of lockdown I could just be with my boy and be mum.”
Luckily Claire sold a villa in Majorca which she’d had for 16 years which meant she didn’t have to worry about money – especially as the entertainment industry was largely ignored by governments on both sides of the border.
She said: “I was in a comfortable position where I’d sold a property so I had a bit of savings so I could sit it out. I’d have hated to have been in a position where I hadn’t got that. That would have been hard. I was lucky.”
It