BBC/Sarah Louise BennettGavin and Stacey star Joanna Page says she stayed silent after being groped by a “handsy” TV host because she didn’t want to “make a fuss”.
The Welsh actress, 48, best known for playing Stacey Shipman in the hit TV series, said while new safety measures had helped, she believed predators would always target young actresses desperate for work.
Her memoir Lush!: My Story – From Swansea to Stacey And Everything In Between shares her personal experiences with sexual harassment at work and reflects on changes in the industry.
Page added she was not naming the person for legal reasons.
She recalled how a producer once warned her the presenter could be “very handsy with the women”, saying it was “just him” and not to worry.
The producer added: “I think he’s going to like you, so just be prepared.”
Page said: “And it was like, ‘Oh, Ok, right, well, I can deal with that.”
On set, he groped her, and she brushed it off with a joke, saying something like, “God, I feel like I’m in Bristol Zoo,” while knocking his hand away.
Page tried to keep it “light-hearted” and said she “would not have dreamed of making a complaint”.
“It’s all very well saying ‘you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that’ but you’re a woman, you’re in there and it’s so hard to get jobs anyway and you don’t want to make a fuss,” she explained.
“I couldn’t have sat in a studio and gone ‘excuse me, can we please just stop this because he’s touching me up and completely groping me? I’m not happy with this’.
“For starters, I’m a people pleaser.
“I don’t want to make a fuss or draw attention to what’s going on. I just want to get on with it.
“So, the only way to deal with it was laugh it off,” Page added.
BBC/Fulwell73 & Tidy Productions/Tom JacksonOn another occasion when she was at the end of the run of a play, Page said a well-known director entered her dressing room while she was barely clothed.
She said she ended up covering herself in a curtain to contain his overly tactile approaches.
“I remember being in my knickers and wrapping the curtain around me and this director coming and hugging me and wanting to give me a kiss and not leaving me alone.
“I remember holding on to the curtain and not letting it go and just carrying on the conversation, being all polite and really nice, until eventually he went because nothing was going to happen,” Page added.
In an interview with PA, Page explained how “predators” would always exist in the industry, “when you’ve got young, beautiful girls who are desperate to get a job”.
While safety measures like intimacy coaches and phone numbers to report people have improved things, she said she feared harassment would continue because “there’s too much opportunity for it to happen in this profession”.
Page said women rarely reported harassment in the past and often “just got on with it at work”, noting for her it “wasn’t every single job I went into, but in lots of different jobs there would be one type of thing”.
Previously Page revealed she wrote Lush! in a disused pub car park, outside a cricket club in the middle of the night and in a car outside her house.
The result was “like a therapy session”.
Gavin and Stacey aired its final episode on Christmas Day last year and took home the comedy award at the National Television Awards earlier this month.
The Christmas Day episode became one of the most watched scripted TV shows of the century.
According to official Barb ratings figures, after seven days of catch-up viewing the finale of the much loved comedy had been seen by 19.11 million people, which beat the last Gavin and Stacey special in 2019 which at the same stage had an audience of 17.92m, rising to 18.49m after a month.
As well as starring in Gavin and Stacey, Page hosts BBC podcast Off The Telly, with EastEnders star Natalie Cassidy, and has appeared in films including From Hell and Love Actually.
If you have been affected by the issues raised in this story you can visit the BBC Action Line for details of organisations who can offer support.