Tamsin Greig plays Alice Chenery
As Alice, Tamsin Greig plays a modern girl with old-fashioned values who finds herself, rather reluctantly, on a series of dates which range from the slightly strange to the downright weird.
The perfect man for her is out there but it is far from certain that they will ever meet.
In real life, Tamsin - best known for her roles in Green Wing, Black Books and The Archers - is happily settled with her husband of eight years, fellow actor Richard Leaf, and their three children - and is more than happy to have left her dating days behind her.
"I think the dating game is a very tricky game to play. It's incredibly exciting, but like walking on a rope bridge over molten lava – it's like an extreme sport and I'm delighted not to have to do it ever again," she laughs. "And I used to be a parachutist so I was into excitement.
"For me, the greatest thing about the dating game was giving it up. I thought, 'This is insane, I don't know what I'm doing and I've got to get out of it'. I made a conscious decision not to date anybody and then, a month later, I met my husband.
So I can understand where Alice is coming from.
"She's not actively looking for love, but she gets herself into these situations either by accident or by someone else's design. She's amazed that the conversation of the girls on the perfume counter is about men all the time - she just doesn't get it.
"But although she doesn't have a desperate desire to be dating, she's driven by this urge to find somebody, even though she won't acknowledge that that's what's going on. It's like a secret longing that's within."
But even while Alice is struggling with her unsuitable suitors, the audience is aware that she has a soulmate in the form of TV scriptwriter Gil.
They may not have met yet, but at least he's out there somewhere and maybe one day their paths will interconnect.
Tamsin and Michael Landes rarely met while filming, so she says it's lovely to see how the two stories interlink and how they mirror each other.
Tamsin herself believes that everyone has a soulmate.
"I do think there's someone out there who is perfect for you but you have to have your eyes open and your heart ready to recognise it when it comes, and you can't be obsessive about looking for it," she says.
"It's a bit like catching a bus – you can't make one come along but you can be ready to jump on it when it does. Unfortunately, Alice doesn't have her eyes open – in fact she's wearing blinkers and ear muffs and a very large overcoat!"
Tamsin met her husband at the wrap party of the Lenny Henry-penned science fiction drama, Neverwhere, and it happened when she least expected it.
"I remember watching the bit at the end of When Harry Met Sally where there are interviews of old couples talking about their relationships and saying that when they met they just knew they were right for each other; it used to make me really cross because I thought they're either lying or they're mad.
"It hadn't happened to me, so obviously that meant it couldn't happen to anyone. Then I met my husband and realised that I was completely wrong, that it does happen and that you do know. But you can't explain to someone what that knowing is like. I was 29 when I met my husband and I thought I'd never meet anybody and suddenly there he was."
And since they met, they have discovered that their lives came very close together years earlier.
"My husband is older than me and we discovered that I went to primary school in the area where he was driving vans for a removal company. He was bombing around the area where my school was so he could very well have run me over, but he didn't, and then he married me.
"So obviously there were a lot of angels protecting his van and his driving.
"We didn't meet until many years later, in a completely different environment, so it's really fascinating to see just how close your paths get and yet they're not allowed to intersect," she says.
Like Alice, Tamsin is slightly bemused by the modern fixation with dating.
"We're obsessed about relationships; we think you have to be in one or getting into one or getting out of one. Marriage is becoming less popular, committing to someone permanently is not very popular and yet we can't help ourselves.
"People are in and out of marriage and relationships - there's something within us that loves to do it but the culture that we're in fights against it.
"I think it's in the heart to be known by somebody, to be loved and to feel completed but we don't have the patience to wait for things these days.
"We have a very immediate and disposable culture so if you don't like something you can just chuck it and start again. Dating is really part of a journey to take us from one place to an ultimate place but somehow we've stopped doing it and we think of it as the end and just carry on dating."
Tamsin has a varied career. Her roles as Dr Caroline Todd in Green Wing and Fran in Black Books brought her to the attention of lovers of offbeat humour, but she has also spent 14 years as the voice of Debbie Aldridge in The Archers.
She loves radio drama but says she tends to do comedy stuff for TV because she has "a hilarious face".
"I once read an article in National Geographic which described the puffin as a bird of comedic solemnity and I really liked it and related to it, so that is what my work has become because comedy can be very solemn and I think you get a feeling of that in Love Soup - there's a comedic solemnity about both Alice and Gil which I really like."
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