Every Little Helped for Jane Horrocks

The actress, famous for roles in Absolutely Fabulous and Little Voice, says that supermarket Tesco helped boost her career when she was hired for their television ads.

The actress, famous for roles in Absolutely Fabulous and Little Voice, says that supermarket Tesco helped boost her career when she was hired for their television ads.

“Tesco commercials have given me licence to avoid crap, and I’m eternally grateful to them,” Horrocks told the Radio Times. “I see friends having to do shows on television, which ten or fifteen years ago they wouldn’t have considered. Now they have to do them for financial reasons, because TV just isn’t investing in drama in the same way.”

Horrocks’ Tesco commercials alongside Prunella Scales first aired in the mid-1990s, and saw the pair as mother and daughter with Horrocks’ character trying to keep her increasingly embarrassing mother in check.

The adverts for the supermarket, and its tagline ‘Every Little Helps’, certainly helped the star – they paid for her south-west London abode, which she nicknamed Tesco Towers.

Horrocks’ latest role is a return to the supermarket scene, although this time as a staff member rather than a customer in Trollied. Jane plays a deputy store manager in the comedy which is set in the Valco supermarket, a fictional budget store in the North West.

“The show takes a comic look at a setting we’ve all spent too much of our lives in, be it buying pasta, arguing with our loved ones or just trying to explain why we don’t want yet another a loyalty card.” Sky One say.