PATRICIA Routledge is looking forward to her visit to Hereford, having already had a taste of the county. "I stayed with some friends and Herefordshire and my hosts made a point of taking me over to see The Courtyard," she reports. "I had a great old chat with Ian Archer (The Courtyard's chief executive).

Patricia, familiar to TV audiences as Hyacinth Bucket and Hetty Wainthrop, will be at The Courtyard in conversation with Edward Seckerson about her earlier career and enormous success in musical theatre.

Explaining how the show came about and how it has evolved, Patricia says: "He rang my agent saying that it's (her career in musical theatre) one of the best kept secrets how much work and how successful Patricia Routledge had been in musical theatre, and would I agree to having a conversation with him which will be recorded and go out on Radio 3 in his series, Stage and Screen.

"I knew him as a very knowledgeable broadcaster about classical music and his Stage and Screen programme was very interesting so I said yes straight away.

"So we had this conversation and he had dug up a lot of recordings as illustrations and we did it in front of a small audience at the Menier Chocolate Factory in Southwark and it went out on Radio 3 a couple of weeks later. Then we started to be invited to present it live at festivals and we have done it now for quite a long time. But we try not to do it too frequently so that we can present it fresh every time, which I gather we manage to do.

"I never in a million years imagined that I'd be doing anything like this," she says. "I don't enjoy talking about myself very much which is why I don't do any chat shows but this is to do with the work and it branches out into interesting information about some of the great people I have worked with.

Although she admits to not going to very much these days, she has enjoyed some of the revivals of "great shows like Guys and Dolls and Gypsy. And recently we had an absolutely superb production of Mack and Mabel at the Festival Theatre in Chichester (where she lives), with a stunning performance by Michael Ball.

"I don't have favourites," she says, "but I have ones I think are particularly wonderful and I talk about them briefly in the show."

Something else Patricia will reveal in the show, but didn't want to give away ahead of her visit to Hereford, was what she might have done had she not gone into the theatre.

"Edward gets it out of me, but I don't want to give the show away," she says, adding that acting had never been her intention. "But I can look back now and see that it was all going on all the time. I was always in school plays and won prizes, so I can see that was happening but I didn't recognise it for a very long time, and had great difficulty taking the plunge.

Now, at 86, she says: "I think I have been in the right job."

And it's a job she continues to enjoy, last year appearing in Oscar Wilde's The Ideal Husband and she'll be on stage again in Admission: One Shilling, a tribute to wartime pianist Dame Myra Hess. "Through her letters and reported conversations and the odd interview we tell her story, with the magnificent assistance of a magnificent pianist, Piers Lane.

Facing the Music with Patricia Routledge will be at The Courtyard on Sunday, October 18 at 2.30pm. To book, call the box office on 01432 340555 or visit courtyard.org.uk