Rescue Sally Phillips.

TV Readers with long memories will remember my love of comedy actress Sally "Smack The Pony" Phillips stretches right back through the decade to annoyance that she was relegated to the best friend role in the film series of which she should undoubtedly have been the star (Bridget Jones) to some small satisfaction that she was at least given the consolation prize of starring (in the arguably much better if little seen) the small screen exploitation of a similar idea Rescue Me (which I wrote about in May 2002) (written by David "One Day" Nichols).

Since, she's generally still been relegated to the best friend role or trod upon service industry worker, most recently in the sitcom Miranda and last night she cropped up in Miranda Hart's comic relief challenge.  Zoe Williams was there for The Guardian and during her reportage, which is about Hart's attempt to organise a wedding, there's a heart wrenching moment in which Sally sounds as though she's joking and we're receiving the feed for a punchline and it becomes apparent that in fact what we're hearing might actually be true:

Sally Phillips was on her way up the town hall steps, her jaunty look topped by a blue trilby. She is one of those comic actors whose mere presence I find reassuring (a comic relief, if you like). I can't imagine her throwing herself into anything rubbish, and she is always 100% thrown in. Nevertheless, does she not think the enterprise just a little, maybe a very small amount, lacking in solemnity?

"You're asking the wrong person, really," she says. "Because I offered myself to the highest bidder, as a wife, for a comic relief ages ago. Then they couldn't use it because they decided it was illegal."

Huh. This throws me. "Who were you hoping would snap you up?"

"I was feeling pretty bleak. I'd just been dumped over the phone. By my fiancé."

She snaps back to 2013. "Anyway. I've just been in the rehearsal. It's already very moving, and Miranda was only in a tracksuit. Imagine what that's going to be like when she's in formal slacks."

Oh Sally.