91Èȱ¬

PA to... Rock van Gelder (Robert Gant)
Take Note... Will she ever find equilibrium?
Most likely to... Make her bosses life uncomplicated
Strengths... She loves being a PA more than life itself
Weaknesses... Just what is she hiding?

Grace Darling's entire raison d'etre is to quite simply be the best. Her route to Hartmann Payne is possibly the most surprising of all the girls, but her being there means more to Grace than any of them. For her, it truly is home.

It seems Grace has no greater ambition than to make her boss Rock Van Gelder's (Robert Gant) life and work as painless and pleasant as possible.

"The way the show's creator, Gabbie Asher, described her initially was as a 'Mary Poppins meets Doris Day' character, which kind of sums up that upbeat, sprightliness and the fact that Grace is quite the perfection of 1950s femininity," explains Olivia.

"It's quite an outdated view of women, but Grace is quite old-fashioned in that she's happy to play the supportive work-wife role for Rock, rather than playing a more active part in the world of finance like Lucy or Jane.

"The main difference in her professional attitude from the other girls is that she actually doesn't see being a PA as a temporary position.

"A lot of the others seem like they're in transit and they want to go somewhere else, but Grace has always had a real desire to belong somewhere, to have a place within a community and to be accepted. So that's what drives her desire to be professionally perfect and that's why she's almost studious in her attention to her friends.

"She's the one that distributes tea and coffee and makes sure they have muffins in the morning. It's very important to her that everyone is taken care of and that she feels needed.

"Rock and Grace work very well together because there's a real kind of love there, but in a very platonic way, which I think brings a great charm to their relationship. They have a similar view on men and women's roles and their place and how they should act professionally.

"Rock is similarly old-fashioned and there's a moment when he says to Sid, 'My PA should be like my picket fence, you're like the outside of my building'. He wants the outside of that building to be perfect and pristine and to represent him and Grace is totally delighted to do that. Whereas Sid isn't."

Grace takes great pleasure in taking care of all the girls and privately sees herself as a mother figure in their lives. She is happy and content in her position at investment bank Hartmann Payne.

That is, until the impossible happens and Grace is left with no other option than to disappear...

"In the first episode you see a few levels of tension beginning to take their strain on Grace, but then it does go on to implode quite massively," sighs Olivia.

"Poor Grace, she really doesn't deserve it..."

There's no doubt the office-based PAs are the best of friends and it seems, off-screen, the actresses who play them have become close buddies as well.

"We've all been living in a kind of Big Brother house in Merchant City and we spend every evening together as we are kind of our only friends here in Glasgow.

"So it has been a very tight group, which is funny because for the first week on set the crew were all teasing us that we were going to hate each other within a couple of weeks and we'd all be pulling each other's hair-extensions out!," jokes Olivia, who starred alongside Michelle Pfeiffer in Stardust and played Lady Adelaide Midwinter in the first series of hit 91Èȱ¬ One period drama Lark Rise To Candleford.

And it's the basic themes of friendship and loyalty in Personal Affairs that really appeal to Olivia. That and the "strutting".

She explains: "What I really like about this show is that to a certain extent it reminds me of American-style comedy dramas. Gabbie seems to have focussed on trying to bring friendships and fondness to the fore, in the way that Scrubs and Friends have done. And I love those kinds of shows.

"We also get to do lots of Sex And The City-style strutting in our heels which was really good fun to film," she adds, enthusiastically.

"The moment when we first come out of the lift together was all done on steady cam. Then, as the four of us are strutting along through the office, someone hands me an important memo or something and it all looks very cool, glamorous and slick. I felt like we were in an episode of The West Wing!"