I’m not quite sure how this has happened. One minute, actress Carol Cleveland is posing for photographs in the sitting room – enviably toned legs neatly to one side, that beauty queen smile – the next, she’s invited us up to her boudoir.

The photographer and I stand outside as – honestly – she “slips into something more comfortable”. She opens the door in a lilac feather négligée and glides on to the satin sheets of the four-poster bed. She’s approaching 70, but Cleveland’s sense of camp remains as acute as it was in her days as the “glamour stooge” of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

“People say comedy is something you can’t learn,” she says afterwards, stroking her excitable new Chihuahua, Tallulah. “You just have to have that streak in you. I’ve always been happy to throw myself into things and be silly.”

And how. Revisiting a few of her appearances in the cult comedy on YouTube (she appeared in 35 of the 45 episodes made and all four of the films), one is reminded of how wonderfully she could send herself up. In The Marriage Guidance Counsellor she resembles a seaside postcard come to life: eyes like saucers, stripy sweater accentuating her “two biggest assets”.

There’s a Python box set in her DVD collection (and Python memorabilia everywhere – I’m served coffee in a Python mug) but she says she doesn’t really like to watch it.

“I find it strange…you think, was that really me?”

She’s feeling particularly old today after a miserable visit to the dentist. “But I’m lucky because I do still resemble myself. You see a lot of people reach a certain age and suddenly they stop looking like themselves. I’ve worked at it though; I still do. I do lots of walking, I go down to the King Alfred’s [leisure centre] in Hove to do a gym/swim and I’ve been pretty good at watching my diet.”

Cleveland is immaculately coiffed and made-up. Does she do this every day? She shakes her head and explains she schleps about in Shoreham, where she has lived for the past eight months, without bothering to make any effort.

“Oh, I go out looking like a real scragbag. But I can’t say I resemble myself then. I’d be terribly embarrassed if anyone recognised me.”

It’s difficult to imagine Cleveland in an old tracksuit. Since her teens, when she competed in endless beauty pageants in California, where she grew up, she has been cast as the glamour girl; indeed, has built an entire career on it. She was – and is – a very attractive woman.

After the pageants she worked as a model, had a brief stint as a Playboy bunny – “I’d like to see the new London club actually”

– before joining Monty Python when the troupe were casting for “A Girl”.

She cheerfully admits she’s never been much of a feminist.

“If people appreciate the way I look and it helps me get work and that makes people happy, then that makes me happy. I feel blessed to have been born with looks that have got me where I am.”

She recounts an episode after a Python show in New York where she was berated by a group of women for “allowing herself” to be treated like a sex object by the group. “I looked at them and said, ‘Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.’”

Life might have been rather different though, had Cleveland been a more feisty sort. While sometimes described as The Seventh Python, she lives rather more modestly than the likes of John Cleese, Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam. But she says it never occurred to her to push for bigger roles in the series – they’d told her they found it hard to write for women and she was too in awe of them all to suggest she wrote herself. “Now I think if I’d presented an idea, they’d have listened and given it consideration but I was too intimidated then.

There they were, these Oxbridge clever types, and there was me, a college girl!”

Perhaps it didn’t seem too important then, anyway.

She was having a great time and had no end of suitors.

She’d imagined she would eventually marry a rich man who would look after her.

But that didn’t happen – “I’m a bad chooser,” she says of her relationships – and work is harder to come by for older actresses. In these straitened times even panto roles – previously a reliable source of income for her – are fiercely fought over.

It’s a different story for men, of course – just look at Ian McShane, who Cleveland dated in the 1960s when they were both students at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA). Seemingly the older and more grizzled he gets, the more his Hollywood stock rises. “He was so handsome!”

Cleveland says. “Then I saw him in Deadwood… imagine! His face is so worn and weathered and lived-in now and I’m sitting there going, ‘That’s my handsome Ian!

That was my first love!’ I don’t know if I dare admit it now.”

It seems a shame that Cleveland should be single, especially as she says she has always been a romantic, “in love with love”. Was she never tempted to date a Python?

“Well…there was Terry Gilliam. He asked me out on a date when we were doing the first series and I didn’t go because at the time I was engaged to a very jealous Italian.” She looks crestfallen briefly. “If I’d accepted, things might all have been very different. I might be living in a lovely mansion in Hampstead Heath!”

A drawing by Gilliam hangs upstairs, depicting Cleveland as a hot air balloon with the rest of the Pythons in the basket below and an inscription that reads: “To Carol, who kept the circus flying.”

But she doesn’t seem one for self-pity. And anyway, she says (and one can almost see the metaphorical fluffing of hair and reapplication of lipstick), isn’t it better to be alone and one’s own person and happy than with the wrong person? Isn’t she lucky she is still working, performing one-woman shows such as Pom-Poms Up!, an autobiographical, tongue-in-cheek glamour “masterclass”? Doesn’t she get a few admirers still?

She gives me that toothy smile again and sends me on my way with a lipstick kiss on my cheek.

* Carol Cleveland performs Pom-Poms Up! at the Latest Music Bar, Manchester Street, Brighton, at 7.30pm on Wednesday, in a double-bill with 78-year-old comic and Brighton Fringe star Lynn Ruth Miller. For tickets, call 01273 687171.

* For more information about Carol Cleveland, visit www.carolcleveland.com