Pauline Daniels has been good and she has been bad - and bad is definitely better, she says. This year, she is back in evil mode playing the Wicked Baroness alongside Suzanne Collins and Pete Price in Cinderella at Wirral's Floral Pavilion in New Brighton. It is a role specially created for her. 'I first played the Empress in Aladdin at the Floral in 1989,' she said. 'She was nice - but I didn't like that. I didn't like being nice.' Panto is just one of the many strings to the bow of Birkenhead-born Daniels. You name it, she has probably done it. Nationally, she first hit the big time by appearing on The Comedians, a TV curiosity in which comics told gags between bursts of music by a banjo band. Pauline, who had already built a reputation in Merseyside clubs, was the only woman to appear. 'It was the last of the series,' she said. 'They have just released the first on DVD so I don't know if they will get to me. 'I doubt if I will earn anything from that anyway, perhaps two pence.' She did appear briefly in the comedy series Bread and surprisingly still gets an income from that. 'Now and again I get a cheque when they have sold it to Outer Mongolia or somewhere and I'll get something like £2.17,' she said. Alas, her year in the Merseyside soap Brookside does not seem to generate a thing in repeats. But Ms Daniels is not one to worry. She has such a diverse career that she hardly stops working, often doing two shows a night. When playing the world's most evil literary fan in Misery at The Brindley - each night she cut off the foot of an author played by Andrew Schofield - she would go on to do a comedy act at a club. Comedy has always been her bread and butter and despite branching out into regular theatre and TV acting work, it's not one she is about to give up. 'It's the variety of work I enjoy,' she said. Speaking of variety, you can't get any bigger difference than that between The Wicked Baroness and the role she played at the Edinburgh Festival in Unprotected, a docu-drama based on the real-life murders of two prostitutes in Liverpool. It was first staged at the Liverpool Everyman, where her performance as the mother of one of the murdered girls earned huge plaudits, a similar reaction coming from critics and audiences in Edinburgh, where it was staged at the Traverse Theatre for the length of the festival. 'I thoroughly enjoyed doing that,' she said. 'It was never just a job - we were all emotionally involved.' In the past two years she has 'done everything except a musical'. That was a shame as it was musicals which got her out of the gag-telling into serious theatre. First came Chicago at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1986 and later Gipsy at the same venue. As it is, she has a musical lined up, Twopence to Cross the Mersey, at the Liverpool Empire next year. She is playing Helen Forrester, the writer on whose book the musical is based. * Cinderella is at the Floral Pavilion in New Brighton, Wirral, from December 22 until January 14. | 
