The podcast is hosted by Nicky Clark, who founded the Acting Your Age campaign to draw attention to the fact that women in the acting profession face discrimination once they reach middle age.

She said: “As I began to look closely at the industry… I found that middle-aged women are decidedly absent and that’s interesting, because middle-aged men still have at least 20, if not 30, years of their career ahead of them in the industry.

“The middle-aged men in many of the shows that I’ve seen have much younger on-screen wives, and yet in my own friendship group this isn’t the case.

“Still, on TV and in film, male actors are paired romantically with women decades younger than they are.”

The campaign is backed by other actresses including Juliet Stevenson, who said: “Male actors may start their careers in their early 20s and they will continue those working lives right through to their 80s or 90s and never experience that plateau that happens [to women] in your late 30s or early 40s.

“There is no hiatus in the trajectory of their working lives or, if there is and they hit a period of unemployment, it won’t be to do with their age.”