Can you tell us about your character, Pam?

The main thing you ought to know is that Pam is Becky's Mum and has early onset dementia. She owns a vintage clothes store in town, but we meet Pam when the illness has got hold of her quite a bit. She’s very forgetful and confused, but sometimes she has very good days. She can be quite cruel, but she and Becky have a loving relationship, which is a little bit damaged.

The relationship between Becky and Pam is complicated, but she relies on Becky a lot for care, which is true to life for a lot of young people…

I think it's really important that you see young people being carers on television. I think they get very little support and a lot of them go unnoticed and have no help from the outside. In Pam's case, she has a carer that comes in for say an hour a day, but it’s not enough as she is getting worse and worse in her illness. That’s an enormous responsibility for a young woman, like Becky, to cope with without any real knowledge of how bad it's going to become.

Pam is losing her ‘self’, what effect does this have on Becky?

The way Pam diminishes is quite subtle because she'd have a fantastic day where she's fine and they’re watching telly and they're laughing and nothing's wrong. And then the next minute she doesn't know where Becky's going, Becky goes out to work and Pam forgets where she is. There’s a lot of guilt on the part of Becky, that she can't be there enough to look after Pam. But then she's a young woman and has this opportunity to live this sort of glossy life and who can blame her for wanting to leave that little flat and live that life.

What is Chloe about to you?

It’s a lot about how people see themselves in the world. And when your sensibility starts diminishing, as in Pam's case, how frightening and out of control the world becomes. I think that's true of Becky as well when she's taking on the persona of Sasha, they're both sort of losing the plot a little bit in different ways. Neither is aware properly of the other one’s situation because Becky’s so wrapped up in this other world she's playing, and Pam is blissfully unaware of the new reality of hers.