Kerry Godliman, from After Life’s dead wife to the lead detective of Dalziel and Pascoe

Kerry Godliman

Photo: Raph_PH / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 17, 1973 Perivale, London, England
Occupation	Actress and comedian
Known for	We Live in Time, The Mercy, Mascots

Kerry Godliman’s most-watched screen performance is a woman who is already dead. In After Life, Ricky Gervais‘s Netflix comedy about grief, she plays Lisa, the wife whose absence drives every scene, and she exists almost entirely on a laptop screen: home videos, flashbacks, messages she recorded for her husband before she died, which he keeps replaying. It is a strange way to become recognisable on several continents, and it is an accurate picture of a career spent warming the edges of other people’s stories.

That is changing. ITV and BritBox have cast her as Detective Inspector Andrea Dalziel in a new Dalziel and Pascoe, the Reginald Hill detectives rebuilt with two women in the car, and the part puts her where she has rarely been on television: in the middle of the frame, carrying the title. The question the casting asks is whether the warmth audiences know her for can hold a crime franchise up, or whether the role needs something harder.

Godliman grew up in Perivale, in west London, where she was born on 17 November 1973, and trained as an actor at Rose Bruford College in south London. Stand-up arrived alongside acting rather than after it. Through the 2000s she worked the comedy circuit while picking up small television parts in the sketch shows Spoons and Rush Hour and the sitcom Home Time, and her sets on Live at the Apollo did what that stage does for a comic: they made the name findable.

The door that mattered opened through Gervais. In Derek, which began on Channel 4 in 2012, she played Hannah, the manager of the care home where Gervais’s title character works, the colleague who treats him as an equal. The BBC military drama Our Girl followed, with Godliman as Belinda Dawes, mother of the soldier at its centre; one reviewer called her performance “honest”, which is the adjective that would follow her for a decade. In 2017 she partnered Jack Dee in the ITV sitcom Bad Move, as Nicky Rawlings, half of a Leeds couple who regret swapping the city for the countryside.

A year later she won the seventh series of Taskmaster, the Dave game show in which comedians are humiliated by absurd assignments, finishing ahead of James Acaster, Rhod Gilbert, Jessica Knappett and Phil Wang. For a certain British audience that victory did more than any sitcom: it showed a competitor who was quick, unflappable and quietly ruthless, qualities her scripted roles seldom asked for.

Then came After Life, three series between 2019 and 2022, as Lisa Johnson. Around it she built a run of drama that kept proving she was more than a comic doing a straight part. In Channel 4’s Adult Material in 2020 she played Stella Maitland, an opinionated MP facing a scandal. From 2021 she led Acorn TV’s Whitstable Pearl as Pearl Nolan, a single mother who runs a restaurant on the Kent coast and works as a private detective on the side, sparring for three series with Howard Charles’s DCI Mike McGuire. From 2022 she appeared in ITV’s bomb-disposal thriller Trigger Point as Dr Sonya Reeves, a bomb data analyst working alongside Vicky McClure’s bomb disposal officer.

Cinema has used her in smaller, telling doses. In John Crowley’s We Live in Time, the 2024 romance with Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh, she plays Jane. In Rob Reiner’s Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, released in September 2025, she is Hope Faith, the daughter of the band’s original manager, Ian Faith, a part that lets her keep a straight face inside one of the most quoted comedies ever made.

The label that built her career is also the one that limits it. Chortle has called her the comedy circuit’s “Ms Relatable”, and the reviews tend to read like that. When she toured Bosh in 2022, Brian Logan of The Guardian gave the show three stars for its “vigour, charm and plenty [of] good gags”, a verdict that praises everything except surprise, and Chortle’s review of her latest tour admitted that some topics, the school WhatsApp group among them, were familiar stand-up territory. On screen, her decency has often served as the moral alibi of other people’s projects. Derek drew accusations that it mocked people with intellectual disabilities, which Gervais denied, and The Guardian’s Sam Wollaston found it “not very good”; Hannah was the character who vouched for Derek inside the fiction. Godliman has rarely been allowed to be the problem in a scene. Her own description of Dalziel, “accomplished at her job, warm, but also direct to the point of being abrasive”, suggests she knows which half of that sentence will be the test. History adds a warning: ITV tried Dalziel and Pascoe once before, in 1993, with the comedy double act Hale and Pace, and it never got past a single story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnfrZyv0ecg

Her recent stand-up points the same way. The Bandwidth tour of 2025 was built on rage, perimenopause, influencers and the “are you a robot?” tests of the internet, delivered by a performer who has run out of bandwidth for all of it. Recorded at London’s Comedy Store, the show aired as a special on Comedy Central on 9 March 2026. In June 2026 she appeared in Netflix’s The Witness, Rob Williams’s drama about the 1992 murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common and the two-year-old son who was its only witness, as Grandma June. In August 2026 she was back with Gervais, voicing Lara, a sarcastic silver tabby, in his Netflix animated comedy Alley Cats, a reunion of several After Life regulars. In July 2026, The Sun reported that Acorn TV would not order a fourth series of Whitstable Pearl, leaving its slow-burning romance between Pearl and McGuire unresolved.

Godliman is married to the actor Ben Abell, and they have two children. Family reaches the stage on her terms: her Gen Z daughter, with her tattoos and her habit of opening a critique with “not gonna lie”, supplies some of the material in Bandwidth.

The new Dalziel and Pascoe was filmed in the north of England in spring 2026, six episodes co-created by Colette Kane and Daisy Martey, directed by Isher Sahota and produced by West Road Pictures, with Nina Singh as the by-the-book Detective Sergeant Paige Pascoe. It will air on ITV and STV and stream on ITVX, with BritBox as the commissioning partner; no broadcast date has been confirmed. Likeability is the one thing nobody needs Godliman to prove. When Andrea Dalziel reaches the screen, the test is whether she lets the inspector be difficult.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Ricky Gervais, Kerry Godliman, Taskmaster, After Life, Dalziel and Pascoe

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