Penarth actress remembers Satellite City (From Penarth Times)

Penarth actress remembers Satellite City

12:40pm Saturday 5th December 2009 in News

PENARTH actress Shelley Miranda Barrett has talked about her time on popular Welsh TV series Satellite City, 10 years after the show left our television screens.

Mrs Miranda Barrett, now 35, played Mandy in the sitcom, which was based on the life of the Price family in an imaginary Rhondda town.

Satellite City – the town’s high number of satellite dishes marked it out as working class – won two BAFTA Cymru awards during the late 1990s and is being released as a special DVD box set on December 4.

Co-written by Boyd Clack and produced by Welsh film company, Fiction Factory, Satellite City featured much loved characters such as Moira who enjoyed being ‘unhappily’ married to Gwynne, nymphomaniac Mandy and nice but dim Dai the Barman.

"I had the best time on Satellite City," said Shelley, whose mother Lorraine Barrett is Welsh Assembly Member for Cardiff South and Penarth.

"I used to travel back to work on the series from London; when I left Paddington on the train no one recognised me, but as it got past Newport, people would start saying, ‘It’s Mandy!’. “I’d get grannies shouting, ‘We saw you lose your virginity last night!’”

Now 35, Shelley was born in Penarth and went to Stanwell Comprehensive, later attending Coleg Glan Hafren where she gained a BTEC in performing arts. She later studied at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance in London and has worked on radio, television and stage.

The box set, available at www.satellitecitystore.com, will delight fans who have campaigned for years with online petitions for a DVD issue.