“I set out to be a serious tragedienne, then I got into Skippy.” Liza Goddard  laughs as she recalls  how her big acting  break, as  Clarissa  “Clancy” Merrick in the  television series Skippy  the Bush Kangaroo,  set her off on a lifetime of working with children and animals.

Of course, the old showbiz adage is to steer clear of both, and Liza concedes that “so many things went wrong” in the filming of Skippy. “We had 20 of the kangaroos,” she explains. “And they were always running off. There was a prize at the end of the day for who could round up the most.”

Liza, 61, secured the part in Skippy after moving to Australia with her family when she was 15. She returned to the UK in 1969 as an adult, where she took on the role of Victoria in the popular television series, Take Three Girls and its sequel, Take Three Women. She has enjoyed a long and successful career on screen and stage, forging a particularly strong working relationship with the playwright Alan Ayckbourn, who has cast her in many of his plays.

Glamorous thief

Many will remember her as the glamorous jewel thief Philippa Vale in Bergerac. She also played the teacher Mrs Jessop in the long-running children’s programme, Woof! - About the adventures of a schoolboy who regularly turned into a dog. Her private life has been just as eventful - she has been married to the actor Colin baker and pop star Alvin Stardust, before meeting her third husband, producer and director David Cobham. And now Liza has written a revealing autobiography, charting her career, her marriages, her battle with breast cancer and how she successfully sued a tabloid newspaper over false allegations of an affair with John Nettles, the star of Bergerac.

She explains that she had been thinking about writing her autobiography for some time but never had the discipline to sit down and do it, until the writer Derek Clements approached her. They worked on the book collaboratively and Liza didn’t shy away from including the more intimate details.

“I thought I ought to include everything in the book because it’s going to be around for a long time. One ought to include everything because people will look back.” she adds that writing it with Derek was helpful because she finds it hard to recall events when confronted with a blank sheet of paper.

“I don’t keep a diary and I did find it hard to remember things,” she says. “I keep waking up in the night and remembering things I should have included.  I’ll have to write another one.”

A pleasure to work with

The book is, aptly, called Working with Children and Animals.  And, although Liza may not have deliberately set out to spend quite so much of her working life with either, they have given her a great deal of pleasure.

She speaks warmly of her love of appearing in pantomimes, describing how the first time she did one she worked with Lionel Blair.  He told her that when you’re acting in a pantomime you have to be “completely real at all times” because the children really believe in the magic.

“It’s just wonderful to see their little faces,” she says. “It’s the first and sometimes the only time that people go to the theatre.” and outside work she has filled her life with children and animals too. She has two grown-up children, Thom and Sophie, and two grandchildren, Oscar and Adelaide.

Sucker for a sob story

Liza tells me that, having just finished touring with two Alan Ayckbourn plays, she’s enjoying spending the summer holidays at home.  And, Liza admits rather ruefully, she can never resist an animal with a “sob story“. At present, she and her husband “only” have four dogs, three chickens, a cockerel, and a pony at their home in Norfolk. At one point, they had nine dogs.

“It was easy,” she says, breezily, of her menagerie. Well, she has had plenty of practice.

Working with Children and Animals by Liza Goddard.  Available in bookshops now RRP £15.99.