Susan Wokoma, 31, joins an all-star cast as she makes her period drama debut - corset and all - in Channel 4's Year of the Rabbit. It's a huge departure from her previous role in the edgy comedy Chewing Gum. Gemma Dunn finds out more.

TELL US A BIT ABOUT YEAR OF THE RABBIT.

Year of the Rabbit is a police procedural set during the Victorian era that focuses on Rabbit, played by Matt Berry, who is a copper, and Strauss, played by Freddie Fox, who is the new kid on the block, and Mabel, who I play, who is the daughter of the chief, played by Alun Armstrong.

She's very keen to become the UK's first female copper. It follows them solving very Victorian-esque crimes, sort of Jack the Ripper levels of violence and weirdness.

DO YOU ENJOY THE ABSURDITY OF THE SHOW?

Absolutely. I'm a big fan of Matt's and I know he does absurdity like no-one else.

The great challenge about this is to get on board with the absurdity of it but also we have a plot and we've got 23 minutes to zip through it.

It was a really big challenge in keeping that weirdness and also getting the plot down.

You want there to be an element of peril and danger. When people get killed, they get killed. That was really fun to tap into both.

There were loads of times on set where I was like: 'What are we saying?' Love it, though.

DO YOU LIKE THE FACT MABEL IS A STRONG WOMAN, FIGHTING HER CORNER IN SUCH A SEXIST WORLD?

Yeah. The thing is, she's grown up in that police station with loads of blokes.

The fight isn't so much 'up for women' because she doesn't have any women around her.

So it's wanting to be one of the lads, work as hard as them, fight as hard as them, catch as many criminals, beat up as many people ... that's where it all comes from.

And then she meets Lydia, Keeley Hawes' character, and that's the first female I think ever in her life that she's gone: 'Oh my God, she's completely different and there's no men around her. What is that?'

YOU MENTION KEELEY HAWES - BUT RIGHT ACROSS THE WHOLE SERIES IT HAS A FANTASTIC CAST.

We've been very lucky. It's been such a coup watching people like Keeley come in and do a stint and be so funny.

Jill as well, Jill Halfpenny, she's just done a drama, Dark Money, and that has been a really gruelling few months for Jill working on that.

To be on a completely different set just having an absolute ball doing the stupidest things is fantastic.

You can't second guess what audiences are going to think, feel or whatever but it's exciting to see people see them in this world as well, being hilarious.

SET IN THE VICTORIAN ERA, THIS SERIES MARKS YOUR FIRST PERIOD PIECE, TOO?

I did a restoration comedy on stage maybe five or six years ago but apart from that everything has been jeans and T-shirts with me, which has been fine.

So that was one of the draws, like: 'OK, how do I be in this world that I'm not normally seen in and be funny and that?' The reality was with great difficulty, wearing a corset.

SO YOU WERE IN A CORSET - WHAT WAS THAT LIKE?

Painful. Genuinely painful. It made me look at all those actresses that do that with a lot of admiration. I don't know how they do it.

But on top of that trying to be funny and running down a street and beating someone up with a bike chain, that genuinely, very quietly, I had to think how to execute that and still be funny. Because it hurts.

There's no two ways about it, it hurts. But it looks great.

IT'S ABOUT AS FAR REMOVED FROM CHEWING GUM AS IT'S POSSIBLE TO GET, ISN'T IT?

Yeah, it is. That's one of the reasons I wanted to do it.

Cynthia in Chewing Gum is such a bizarre, strange character whereas there's so much where Mabel is aware and sure of herself.

But over the course of the series that gets tested and she gets knocked off her axis.

In terms of style, in terms of language, in terms of the scale of it, in terms of the plot, it couldn't be more far away from Chewing Gum.

DO YOU THINK COMEDY HAS BECOME MORE DIVERSE - ARE THERE MORE OPPORTUNITIES FOR WOMEN, FOR ONE?

Yeah, I'm in this and that would not have been the case probably a little while ago.

That's the truth. But my involvement in this show hasn't felt like 'let's go and tick a box'.

You know when you're in something and you're ticking a box, so in that respect, it's changing.

There's a lot to still happen but I'm in a position where I'm getting opportunities to write my own stuff and when I left drama school in 2010 that was not the case. So it's slowly getting better.

Year of the Rabbit airs on Channel 4 on Monday, June 10.