“HE WRITES about human life, human emotion, right down to the core. But, of course, he does it with great humour.” Thus actress Liza Goddard, briskly summing up the style of playwright Alan Ayckbourn, whose 71st play she brings to the Oxford Playhouse next week.

Love and Beth premiered at Ayckbourn’s home theatre in Scarborough last year and the touring version retains most of the original cast, with Ms Goddard playing the eponymous Beth.

She is recently widowed and invites a small group of people to her home at Christmas. In typical English fashion, they find it difficult to deal with bereavement and it is, in fact, only Beth herself who holds them together: ‘They talk about their own experiences and weep and fall about generally. She’s all right, but everyone else is collapsing around her.”

It is important to say that there is more than a touch of the supernatural in this play, but just as important to go no further in ruining the plot.

As might be expected from Ayckbourn, comedy and drama are interwoven.

“Alan always says that, if you’re doing drama, you have to find the comedy, and if you’re doing comedy, then you have to find the gravitas behind it.

“Alan writes serious plays: the fact that he also writes corking one-liners is a mark of his genius.”

Goddard is also generous about his directing abilities “What he does in rehearsal is very gently give you a complete blueprint of how the character is feeling — you know exactly the emotional journey. Oh, and you do have to get the words right — it’s a little unnerving having him sit in front of you mouthing your lines and wincing when you get it wrong.’ Liza Goddard is lucky that as she approaches the age of 60, she is still in demand for theatre roles in dramas ranging from Wilde to Bennett. She has not spurned pantomime either.

But, inevitably: “I find it very sad that a lot of the modern writers, apart from Ayckbourn, don’t write for the more mature woman. It’s this weird thing at the moment of skewing it — a lot of television is all about a particular age group, like thirties or twenties, and you think, ‘well, that’s nothing; it simply doesn’t represent life as we know it’.”

That’s all very well for her to say now, and utterly permissible.

But for those (men, especially) of a certain age, it is impossible to forget that she made her television breakthrough in 1969 as the beautiful and vivacious Victoria in Take Three Girls — a series all about, er, a group of young women setting up house together at the end of that swinging decade.

She’d already made her mark on children’s TV in Australia as a teenager in the classic Skippy The Bush Kangaroo, a two-year job that put her completely at ease in front of the camera.

“It became just like normal life. I found it really easy to do,” Goddard told me in her confident and matter-fact-way of speaking.

“Yes, it can seem quite hard when you’ve got a crew of perhaps 40 people looking at you, but when you’re doing it every day, it’s very easy to concentrate. Mask them all out, even though they’re right next to you.”

I reminded Goddard that she was only 16 when she started.

“Yah, well, that’s the time, isn’t it — ‘cos you’re not afraid of anything at that age.”

She’s just as straightforward discussing Take Three Girls.

“After Skippy, I travelled, and ended up penniless. So, I got in touch with an agent, who put me up for this series, and they were looking for an upper-class brunette girl and the casting people said, ‘what? We don’t want a blonde Australian’. Anyway, I went along and, of course, I got the job. We knew it was good, but we didn’t know it was going to be the huge success it was’.

And then along came The Brothers, working with the man who became her first husband, Colin Baker (not an area for discussion) and other regular TV employment, especially in a recurring role in Bergerac.

There was a second high-profile marriage, to singer Alvin Stardust, and a third, which has lasted, to producer/director David Cobham.

She happily claims never to have been out of work, remains — in her words — “theatre-fit, with a big voice and staying power” and has two children and a grandchild.

She’s also one of the least fussy and most direct actors I’ve ever spoken to.

Hang on, though. Liza Goddard, of Take Three Girls, with a grandchild?

How swiftly the years pass.