But how does it feel to be the newest, least popular kid on the block, after being cock of the walk? After all, EastEnders used to get more than 20 million viewers per episode. Family Affairs averages around 900,000.”I am very happy here,” she says, “and I feel that this team could run the universe. Yes, EastEnders and Coronation Street get huge audiences, and trade off massive loyalty. But the downside to that is a certain self-obsession, a self-adulation. Also, they are struggling with a massive history, trying to revitalise all the time Compared with the others, this has a youthful freshness. It connects with the 21st century.”We have a black family without playing the race card They are completely integrated And ours is a predominantly middle-class arena. Our characters are upper-level tradespeople and professionals, so their aspirations and level of articulateness are very different.

The other soaps are all working-class.”And yet a soap is a soap is a soap, witness the storylines on Family Affairs. Harris, and the story producer Johann Knobel, run through a few of them for me. “Murder, a stalker, a stepmother having an affair with her stepson, mental illness, bulimia,” she says, cheerfully “We did male rape before Hollyoaks. And coming up, we’ve got a huge love story with a very peculiar angle to it.” The mind boggles.

Could that be how the horse came to squash the actor’s foot this morning? Might Harris one day boast that “we did bestiality before Brookside”?I banish this terrible thought from my mind. Instead, I ask feebly, who are the celebrity fans of Family Affairs? Corrie, for instance, boasts Sir Cliff Richard, Cilla Black and Camilla Parker-Bowles “The composer Michael Nyman,” says Knobel “I’ve heard that Derek Jacobi likes it,” adds Harris “And Graham Norton certainly used to watch it He liked the Harts.”Ah, the Harts. When Family Affairs started, in March 1997, the title referred to the Hart family – Chris and Annie, their children Holly, Duncan, Melanie and Jamie, and grandad Angus. The show’s creators, Mal Young (ex-Brookside) and Corinne Hollingworth (ex-EastEnders) insisted that there would be no sensationalism, no lesbian snogs or incest or bodies under patios, just an ordinary family going about its everyday life in fictional Charnham, a town somewhere near Maidenhead.There were only 13 characters, and most of them were called Hart.