AWARD-winning actress Jane Horrocks has dropped her trademark Lancashire accent for her latest TV acting role.

The petite 47-year-old, who grew up in Rawtenstall, has revealed she hates having to act using her own voice.

So it’s a ‘posh’ Liverpool accent which she has perfected for aspiring supermarket boss Julie in upcoming Sky1HD comedy Trollied, which starts next weekend.

“I don't feel comfortable performing as me, so even if it's a northern voice, it has to be something different to what I am,” said Horrocks, a former pupil at Fearns High School, Stacksteads.

It will be only the second time (the first being for BBC's The Amazing Mrs Pritchard) Horrocks has used a different accent to the one which has brought her great success, despite being told to “tone it down” at drama school.

Unlike most sitcoms, Trollied isn’t being filmed in the corner of a draughty warehouse.

It's a vast production, complete with shoppers in anoraks, promotional displays and strip lighting.

“For them to have built this arena for us to play in is brilliant.

"I don't think it would have been feasible in a real supermarket, unless you did it all on night shifts,” says Horrocks, who lives in Twickenham with her husband writer Nick Vivian and children Dylan and Molly.

Her character is a fiercely ambitious, rather snobby lifetime employee of the Warrington branch of Valco.

“Julie's worked there for 20 years so she knows it back to front,” she says, with a flutter of her heavily made-up eyelashes.

She’s even taken her admiration to the next level by formulating a crippling crush on the store manager Gavin, in front of whom she turns into what Horrocks describes as “a gibbering wreck”.

But there’s a sad story beneath Julie's thick lipstick and bossiness, as Horrocks explains: “She was jilted four years ago so she’s carrying all that angst, and it crops up on many occasions.

“She was thrown off kilter and didn’t apply for the role of deputy manager when it came up, so she's a missed-opportunities sort of person.”

Horrocks won acclaim for her role in the film Little Voice, based on a stage play by Bolton writer Jim Cartwright.

She also won fans as scatty secretary Bubbles in TV's Absolutely Fabulous.

And she revealed she leapt at the chance to play jobsworth Julie as soon as she read the script: "I really wanted to do it, and I've not felt that way about anything for a long time," she sighs.

It was while watching Come Dine With Me that Horrocks found her inspiration for Julie, however.

"The episode was set in Stoke-on-Trent and there was this character called Tracy who I thought was a real snob. She got things so wrong but was dismissive of the other competitors.

"So she's on my screensaver on my computer and was absolutely what I thought Julie would be."

With its workplace location, string of colourful characters and a will-they-won't-they romance between two of the younger members of staff, there's an obvious parallel with The Office for producer Ash Atalla’s latest comedy.

Horrocks acknowledges this but says that, despite its fly-on-the-wall style, the series is much less naturalistic than Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's creation.

"You may think it's The Office set in a supermarket. But I think it might be slightly more heightened than that."

Naturally, she'll be hoping Trollied will have the same universal appeal of Gervais's creation, produced by Atalla, which has spawned seven regional variations across the globe.

"Most people go to supermarkets to shop, so I think people will recognise things in it, like manoeuvring trolleys and opening those silly little bags for your fruit and veg."

It's also strange for Horrocks to find herself among the shelves again, having starred for years alongside Prunella Scales in television adverts for Tesco.

"I actually like supermarket shopping," she says. "I find it very therapeutic.

"People say, 'When you go to Tesco after you've been working all day on this, do you walk around thinking about the job?'

"But I don't do that at all, I just do my shopping. It's an everyday occurrence — I'm never out of Tesco," she adds, sounding every bit as faithful as her new screen persona.

* Trollied, which also stars Mark Addy and Rita May, begins on Thursday on Sky1HD.