PAULINE Quirke, Linda Robson and Lesley Joseph had last worked together on their BBC sitcom Birds Of A Feather in 1999.

For nearly ten years through the 1990s, they had played sisters Sharon Theodopolopoudos and Tracy Stubbs and their sex-mad neighbour, Dorien Green, regularly drawing ten million viewers, and when the Comedy Theatre Company suggested they should reunite for a new Birds show, once more written by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, that told only half the story.

This would be a stage show that would tour the country.

“I hadn’t done any theatre for 25 years,” says Pauline, now 53. “Well, apart from four weeks at the Hackney Empire with Linda, when I played Ratbag Lady in Dick Whittington and had to sing I’m Too Sexy For A Rat, so I’ll leave that image with you.”

Pauline and co can be seen in Birds Of A Feather at the Grand Opera House, York, from Tuesday as a tour that begin last year gains its second wind in another round of shows in 2013, yet the return of Birds was far from certain when Pauline was first approached in mid-2011.

“We had left the series at the top of its game. We’d done 100 episodes in ten years and we wanted to go out on a high,” she says. “We could have carried on but it gets to the point where you think, ‘Enough is enough’, and you quit when you’re ahead. So we all went off and did other things.”

ITV1’s Broadchurch has been a particular high point for her, but Pauline decided to say yes too to a life of suitcases and ever-changing bedrooms on a tour of Birds Of A Feather.

“It was all about the quality of the script, otherwise I wouldn’t have done it because previously I didn’t like to do theatre and hadn’t done tours,” she says.

“But at 53 I want to prove I can get up with the best of them, get up there with the girls and my son Charlie, who’s 18 and just about to finish doing his A-levels. I had to prove to myself that I could do it as I’d been asked to do a lot of theatre stuff in the 45 years since I started, but I was just too scared. It’s the build-up to the shows, but that’s the case even with TV.

“It felt like you’d got a dental appointment booked for five o’clock in the afternoon but the dentist had asked you to be there for nine o’clock in the morning.”

Pauline is delighted to report that she is much more relaxed on this year’s 14-week stretch of theatre shows than she was for last year’s stage return.

“We had three preview nights in Leatherhead and I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God! What have I let myself in for?’” she says.

“But Charlie was there too and so I had to give myself a good talking-to.

“What we’ve learnt is that there’s nothing that goes wrong that we can’t put right as we’re each other’s comfort blanket on stage.”

It helped too that the old Birds chemistry between Pauline, Linda and Lesley worked instantly once more.

“It really was like we’d never been apart and had just had a long weekend off, even though we’d had all those years away, but the chemistry was there before and it’s something that doesn’t go,” says Pauline.

“Lots of events have happened to us; births, deaths and marriages, and we’ve shared all that and absolutely adore each other. Linda and I share one dressing room and Lesley is next door and we just chat, chat, chat.”

Their return has proved such a hit that Marks and Gran are writing new Birds Of The Feather episodes for a TV comeback, initially a Christmas special and now a full series that has been commissioned by ITV after the BBC declined to commit to more than the Christmas show.

“Without a good script you can’t expect just to wheel us out again, but having the three of us back together and good scripts, we’re back,” says Pauline.

• The Comedy Theatre Company presents Birds Of A Feather, Grand Opera House, York, Tuesday to Saturday, 7.30pm plus Wednesday and Saturday matinees at 2.30pm. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or atgtickets.com/york