It’s for this reason we feel personally affronted when we see Martin Freeman, who played Tim, goofing about in the so-so sitcom Hardware It’s hardly The Office. But then, what is?Lately, Davis has been forging her own way forward. She’s in two British films Shaun of the Dead (more of which later) and The Sex Lives of the Potato Men (as little as possible of which later), and she’s making a concerted effort to break into Hollywood.”It sounds terribly glamorous, doesn’t it?” she says, munching her way through sugar-free Polos and Diet Coke in a photographer’s studio in London’s East End “Really, it’s not. I read in the papers the other day that I was inundated with offers from Hollywood and I was thinking, ‘As soon as someone tells me, that will be great.’ Hurr! Hurr!”She’s got a terrific laugh has Davis. We spent ages looking for people who didn’t rely on those normal drama-school tricks.

And you simply couldn’t see Lucy’s acting.”It’s one thing being one of the best-loved characters in The Greatest Sitcom Of All Time (regardless of what Great Britain votes on the current BBC poll) It’s quite another escaping the shadow of that character. “There’s this universally accepted style of TV drama acting that is considered ‘realistic’ But it’s only realistic compared with other TV dramas. With rival operators, such as Bagel Factory, Ixxy’s Bagels and Oi! Bagel, Bagel Street wanted a slot at the premium end of the market “We’re a niche retail food operator. All we do is bagels and all we do is deli-style, so it is all customised,” says 39-year-old Downing.Around the time she was disposing of the Soho unit and the bakery, Downing put more of her own money into the business rather than dilute her majority stake by seeking further funding.

“I had to remortgage my house.” It was a good decision, she says. “After selling the bakery we were breaking even.” By the end of 2001, as the company moved from start-up to growth, it needed something to mark it out from the competition. Heathrow airport was identified by Downing as the best potential location – an ambitious goal given that Bagel Street was still a small operation, led by a founder who was still putting in 80-hour weeks. “Heathrow wanted premium, niche operators,” she says.Bagel Street was short-listed for the tender process, competing against the likes of Compass, and won on its second attempt.