My life as a mag hag

Sally Phillips is dressed in something trim and black. She is wearing discreet pale foundation and her blonde mane has almost been tamed. Her look, so different from her more unruly screen persona, takes me by surprise. This must be what it's like to discover your kid sister is - shock, horror - a bit of a babe. You're looking smart, I volunteer. She pulls up her black trousers to reveal odd socks. One pink. One red. Off comes a shoe. The pink one has a hole in the toe.

A small, sad part of me nurses the hope that this is a small, funny blonde's way of making a pass. If funny is sexy, then Sally Phillips is sex on (medium-to-short) legs. Best known for the all-girl smash-hit comedy sketch show Smack the Pony, she has built an entire career on being the type of girl who doesn't get the guy - something of an achievement as she's actually very pretty. She talks about her "stupid face", and could self deprecate for England. Out comes a hard-luck tale of how she was going to snog Johnny Depp in a movie until it fell through. She's the kind of woman whose attractiveness resides in the fact that she thinks it's hilarious anyone could find her attractive.

Phillips, the 31-year-old daughter of a British Airways manager, has crept into our consciousness as an arch practitioner of inadvertent scene-stealing. There was hardly anything of her in I'm Alan Partridge, but her hotel receptionist, trying desperately to keep a straight face, was a brilliant piece of naturalistic comedy. She had - what? - a minute in Born Romantic, and was the best thing in it. Nor was there enough of her as Shazzer in Bridget Jones's Diary. "A producer told me Bridget couldn't be depressed for more than 90 seconds, or it somehow lost itself. So that was me. My character was only ever there when she was depressed." Her tiny appearance in Notting Hill was so high impact they had to excise it (and put it on the DVD) so it didn't overshadow the rest of the movie.

Now, at last, she's getting her own sitcom lead in Rescue Me, an Ally McBeal-type workplace entertainment set in a frothy women's magazine. Sally - Katie Nash - works for Eden, a sort of Red meets Cosmo, in which advice about running your life is dished out in 2,000-word dollops by features editors who can preach but not practise. Katie's problem is that she had a one-nighter with her husband's best man and her marriage is over.

Phillips had fun researching the role by spending some time on Glamour magazine. "I established that working on a women's magazine was similar to Smack the Pony: it was predominantly female, and the way they batted ideas around seemed similar."

Unlike many comedians, Phillips has never hankered after the more respectable world of drama. "I had never really planned on doing it. In fact it struck me as something I specifically didn't want to do. I thought that everyone took themselves far too seriously." But initially she found herself loving it more than she expected to. "In comedy, everyone is very harsh, but fair. They go: 'That was shit.' In drama, everyone was going: 'That was marvellous.' To start with, I just believed them. I thought, this is so nice, why did I ever do comedy? By the end of it I was really missing having some creative input, because in drama you are a pawn."

She's currently writing a comedy for the BBC with writer Peter Baynham which "in our most arrogant dreams is trying to be Magnolia meets Brazil meets The Simpsons". It's obvious she needs the affirmation of other people's laughter like a fix: does she feel guilty about it? "I could definitely envisage writing and not performing. I always think I don't have the performing itch quite as much as other people. You go out to the pub and there are people who just have to do the accent of the cab driver on the way there. There are times when there's no conversation and I just think, oh sod it, and embark on a monologue that's going to make people laugh because I can't bear the silence. But in general it's a bond with people. I really like to turn up, make 40 boys laugh and then leave."

She was engaged for a bit, until the Christmas before last, an episode she has turned into another story against herself. "It was a terrible, terrible mistake," she says. "I was massively, massively misguided. He was, as well. I don't quite know what happened. We are completely incompatible. I think both of us suffer from not thinking things through, and so we got engaged after about 10 days, which was massively romantic and then we struggled for nine months trying to find some way of making it work, having already got engaged. Too proud to admit defeat, I'll keep struggling. I got fat and unhappy. And then we finally gave up."

Rescue Me starts Sunday on BBC1