"I’m unemployable in the real world – I will never get a proper job again. In this business, when you get to my age, and I have been around a long time, you have got to keep reinventing yourself.”

So says Altered Images frontwoman and former Red Dwarf star Clare Grogan, prior to appearing at this month’s edition of the arts networking event The Space.

Grogan’s long career has seen her pop up on radio, in Eastenders, as a political rocker in Father Ted, in the Portslade-filmed Britflick The Penalty King and even write a children’s book.

Just looking at her 30-year career it is clear she could never return to being a waitress in the Italian restaurant where she was first spotted by Gregory’s Girl writer-director Bill Forsyth.

“He said to me he was planning on making a movie,” remembers Grogan, who reunited with fellow cast-mates John Gordon Sinclair and Dee Hepburn at the Glasgow Film Festival last year to celebrate the cult favourite’s third decade.

“I didn’t think anything would come of it – I didn’t even know what kind of movie he was talking about! I just told him if it went any further he could contact me at the restaurant – which he did six months later.”

The same year Gregory’s Girl was released, Grogan was scaling the top ten with her band Altered Images with the hit singles Happy Birthday and I Could Be Happy.

“In hindsight it freaks me out,” she says. “The year I left school I made Gregory’s Girl and got signed to Epic Records. I have no idea why that happened to me, but I’m definitely glad I did. It’s hard to say why it happened.

“When you’re young you’ve got the energy to juggle those two things. I was living my dream, and on some level I was quite blasé about it. I had no life experience, I just took those things in my stride.”

With the 1980s nostalgia boom she has relived the rock experience on the national Here And Now Tours, and last year’s Rewind Festival in Henley-On-Thames.

“It’s strange, when the promoters of Here And Now first approached me I turned them down,” she says.

“I couldn’t imagine recreating something that was so much about being young as a 40-year-old. When I started talking to friends and family about it, they said not to be so selfish, they wanted the opportunity to revisit the past.

“I’ve really got to enjoy singing to an audience again, and the adrenaline rush. At the Rewind Festival we were in front of 40,000 people – we never played those sort of audiences when the band was around first time.”

Grogan is set to join the new cast of Skins for the eagerly anticipated fifth season, as the mother of the super-confident bitch you love to hate Mini McGuinness.

“The parents for the most play bit-parts,” admits Grogan. “I play the kind of mum you wouldn’t want to introduce your boyfriend to in case they steal him!”

She’s also considering an offer to take part in Comic Relief’s latest charity fundraiser Let’s Dance, and has just finished the sequel to her debut 2008 children’s novel Tallulah And The Teen Stars, which tells the story of a young girl band.

“Writing the book was certainly therapeutic,” she says. “I wrote it at a time when my mum was very ill.

I needed to go back and play out in my head a happy time in my life. I didn’t set out for it to be autobio- graphical, but in many ways it ended up that way.”

With everything going on around her though, the role she’s happiest to be in is that of a mum.

“I think it’s important to have a bit of balance,” she says. “I like getting in and out of the performance and music world, but at the end of the day I like being at the school gates as well.”

n Also being interviewed by The Space’s new host Guy Lloyd is BBC Four controller Richard Klein.

Starts 7.30pm, tickets £5/£7.50. Call 0845 2938480.