If so, you'll just have to take it from a fan - reproduction of sets, costumes, voices and mannerisms of the original cast is impeccable. The comedy has a new tang, with the Bradys living 1970s lives and wearing 1970s fabrics in polluted, crime-ridden, post-Reagan America. I'd always been mimicking and imitating, and it was something I'd never had a chance to do until I was offered this.""This" is what Long is here to promote - The Brady Bunch Movie - and the reason she has left her sunny Los Angeles home for the London fug. "Nobody could have come from a less theatrical family than I did.

Here were my parents, both teachers, and they had this hammy kid who always went for schtick and jokes and goofy stuff. It's a joke."Well, you would think I had been kidnapped!" she laughs. As she tells you she was kidnapped as a baby, you think it sounds like a typically melodramatic Diane story But it isn't. It was all fun, though."But when Nick Colasanto, who played Coach, passed away, Diane and I missed him greatly. Woody Harrelson is wonderful, but there was something missing for me without Coach. Once he was gone, Diane had nobody to turn to when the crowd ganged up on her. In any case, I didn't want to be stuck in that part for the rest of my life."She sits sipping tea, with her perfectly pressed suit and her perfectly pressed smile and hair that bounces with an almost audible "boing" whenever she turns her head.

"We would have done better had we been more verbal with each other about some of the things that were going on. For five of the show's 11 years, she tottered around the Boston bar acting like a bossy prefect on library duty, straining to bring a little intellectual light to the lives of the bozo barflies, and wrestling with her chauvinistic suitor, the terminally dumb Sam, played by Ted Danson. "I think Ted and I only had one argument in my five years," Long says. When meeting an actress who has spent a large part of her career in one role, it's easy to believe she is that person. In the case of Shelley Long, you can't help but think you're knee to knee with Diane Chambers, the prissy, be-ironed, anally retentive waitress Long played in Cheers, a series which, alongside Roseanne, can lay considerable claim to being the finest American sitcom in memory. If they did, they might well stop looking around for millennial novelty and seek, instead, to improve existing forms of city-centre transport.How about designing proper new red and regulated double-decker buses for central London routes instead? As Mr Gladstone said, it was from the top of these, that one had the best views of London..