"The best thing about life post 60?" says Arabella Weir. "Losing your libido. It's fucking brilliant. Like being unchained from a maniac." 

As a woman who has spent years dealing with people claiming to be the originator of her famous Fast Show catchphrase "Does my bum look big in this?", Weir is quick to point out that it was the author Kingsley Amis who coined the phrase, but it is a sentiment she absolutely stands by now, at 68. 

"I mean it's great if you are still up for it, and I do still have sex now and again, but I can't say I think about it anymore and I used to think about it constantly. I was obsessed with sex. My friends used to describe me as a gay man trapped in a woman's body. It's such a relief to not have that anymore." 

The joke is about sex, but what Weir is really describing is not the disappearance of desire but the disappearance of something far more exhausting: the need to be desired, and for validation. In its place, liberation. 

"Unfortunately, I think it's still true for the vast majority of heterosexual women, at least my generation, that your self-worth is tied up with how the opposite sex sees you. So part of your purpose as a younger woman, even if you objected to it as a feminist, was maintaining your currency. I don't even know that I had a high sex drive, but I certainly had a high desire to make boys fancy me and have the evidence they did. Being found sexually attractive is intoxicating and makes you feel powerful." 

It is a striking admission. Not because it undermines feminism, but because it acknowledges an uncomfortable truth many women will relate to: that when we are younger, we believe our power lies in our ability to attract, to be wanted and chosen. What Weir is saying is that later midlife changes that. The power shifts from being wanted to simply wanting your own life, on your own terms. Power is redefined and with it, sex. 

"I feel like you reach the point where you can separate your sex drive completely from all that validation stuff," says Weir. "So it literally becomes about enjoyment, whether you fancy it or not. So much simpler." 

Weir attributes some of her need for validation to a highly critical mother who, she says, projected her insecurities onto her. "She literally spelled it out that I wasn't pretty, thin, or Oxbridge enough. She attached worth to beauty herself so it's hardly surprising I did too. I might say when I was younger, a bloke's just whistled at me! And she'd go, oh, you'll mind it when it's gone." 

Well, Arabella's mother. Evidently not. 

Weir divorced the father of her two children in her mid-fifties, then briefly wondered if she needed another partner. Not because she desperately wanted one, but because she had absorbed the idea that she should have one. 

"When you've had heartbreak and you become a single parent, which I very much didn't want to because I had the spectre of my mother who hated it, you're vulnerable and you don't trust yourself. I thought, I need someone." 

That was until she realised there was no gap in her life to fill. 

"I went on one of those dating websites for about three days. And besides people thinking it was a scam, it just felt wrong. Thoughts were racing around my head: what if you get ill? There'll be nobody to look after you. What if I have cancer treatment? But then it dawned on me. If I was having cancer treatment, it would be one of my best girlfriends by my side, not my husband." The search ended almost as quickly as it began. "I literally thought: what am I doing?" 

Weir does have a partner these days but does not live with him, seeing him at weekends. "There's a lot of love in our relationship but nobody telling me what to do anymore in my life." Instead she lives with her gay friend and has done for nine years. "It's fabulous. He's not my partner, so I have none of the demands of having a partner, but all the good bits. Meals together, going to things together. I think probably every postmenopausal woman is looking for a gay guy to live with." 

Twenty years ago she might have worried what people thought of her life choices. Today, she simply does not. 

With less mental energy spent wondering whether men fancy her, what a normal relationship looks like or whether her bum looks big, she is directing that energy elsewhere: her friendships, her work and campaigning. She is now deeply involved with Gordon Brown's Multibank charity, helping redistribute surplus goods to families in need, and says making a tangible difference gives her greater satisfaction than almost anything else she has done. "It's probably why I got my MBA," she says. "Not for being a most brilliant entertainer, as I joke with my friends." 

The other thing, of course, is the ability to trust herself. "If I have learned anything it's that you'll never know what somebody else wants, so you might as well do what you want." 

It is a deceptively simple philosophy, but perhaps that is the real gift of midlife: not that we stop caring, just caring less about approval and more about the things that really reflect our vision of the world. As Weir puts it, borrowing Wanda Sykes' line: "It's not that I don't give a fuck. I just have fewer fucks to give." 

Arabella Weir will appear in Two Doors Down Live at Glasgow's Hydro this autumn, with a new series of the sitcom also due in 2027.