Actress Gillian Anderson, who has described Jeremy Clarkson as 'very sweet' and an 'insitution'

Award-winning actress Gillian Anderson said Top Gear hooks its audience like a ‘testosterone-filled injection’, and is devoured by fans like TV ‘comfort food’.

The star, who is in talks to resume playing FBI Agent Dana Scully in an X-Files TV re-boot, and will play murder detective Stella Gibson in a third season of The Fall, told me that embattled host Jeremy Clarkson was ‘very sweet’ to her when she was a guest driver on the popular BBC show recently.

‘People rely on it,’ she said. ‘He’s become an institution — and the show’s an institution.’

The actress, who in addition to her TV work has been nominated for an Olivier award for her scorching performance as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Young Vic, told me the hysteria over Clarkson’s suspension was understandable, because fans addicted to his controversial style weren’t ‘going to get their fix any more’.

In any event, Anderson understands all about satisfying TV viewers. She and Jamie Dornan, the hunter and the hunted, served up some pretty tasty fare in Allan Cubitt’s electrifying The Fall.

She will once more don Detective Superintendant Gibson’s sensual silk blouses to film a third series next year. Oh, and some of those seen in season two will be back in series three. ‘She’s not going to suddenly get all new blouses!’ Gillian exclaimed. ‘The realism is important to me, and she’s obviously not going to let go of that wardrobe. So, there’ll be a mixture of old and new.’

There will be some digging into Stella’s past, too; but the opening episodes will look at the repercussions from the series two finale — when serial killer Paul Spector was shot by a jealous husband as Stella was about to apprehend him.

Anderson refused to give too much away about the glamorous but tough officer with ‘Daddy’ issues she plays in the show. ‘It’s the mystery that keeps it as compelling as it is,’ she said.

However, she did say that The Fall won’t be shot until very late this year, or early next — and that she believed it could go into a fourth season in 2017.

Plus, if intense negotiations can be finalised soon, then filming of six episodes of the very last look at the X-Files, the sci-fi show that launched her and David Duchnovny 22 years ago, could be under way as early as June.

Writers who worked on the original series have been asked to contribute. ‘The idea is to get the old gang back, have some fun and get a bit of closure for us and the audience,’ she told me.

On stage, Anderson was part of the acclaimed Young Vic season that produced A View From The Bridge that’s packing them in at Wyndham’s Theatre right now; and the mouthwatering re-imagining of Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar, which saw her completely re-define Blanche.

Miss Anderson appeared on the BBC show recently as a guest driver alongside Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May

She’s excited about her Olivier nomination — one of 11 for the Young Vic — and of the prospect of playing Blanche in New York. It’s likely that she, Ben Foster and Vanessa Kirby will reprise their roles in Joshua Andrews’s production at the St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in the spring and summer of next year.

‘It’s nice to be able to do it over there,’ she said.

And as if she’s not already busy enough, a sci-fi blockbuster, Robot Overlords, in which she stars, opens next week.

Negotiations to put Motown the Musical into the London Palladium have fallen through because the Palladium’s management has decided to take a break from long-running shows (not that they’ve had many lately) so they can contract one-night stands, one-week runs and other short-term projects.

Comic Relief played the Palladium last weekend; future events include a Frank Sinatra tribute, the possible return of Cats in the autumn, and shows from ITV and the BBC. So now Motown’s looking for another home.

Judi adds to election fever

Judi Dench and her daughter Finty Williams will play exactly those roles when they appear as part of the large ensemble of a drama set against the backdrop of the General Election.

The Vote, written by playwright James Graham with Judi in mind, will run at the Donmar Warehouse from April 24.

The company will perform on election day, May 7 — and a live 90-minute broadcast of that show will be screened on More4, from 8.30pm.

Judi Dench and her daughter Fintry Williams, who will star together in the large ensemble drama General Election

Graham said Judi and Finty (right) will play voters who go to their local polling station, manned by Catherine Tate.

Graham and director Josie Rourke spent time with poll clerks in Lambeth. ‘We hadn’t realised how much drama goes on in a polling station,’ the writer said. The cast includes Paul Chahidi, Rosalie Craig, Hadley Fraser, Bill Paterson and Timothy West.

Graham’s clearly a political junkie because he has also written Coalition, for C4, about the almost Shakespearean scuffle between Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, all trying to grasp power after the last election. It’s a brilliantly written — and acted — piece from Cuba Pictures that casts Clegg as an heroic figure on an axis between ambition and responsibility.

Bertie Carvel’s portrait of the Lib Dem leader is masterful. Mark Dexter, Ian Grieve and Mark Gatiss are all good as, respectively, Cameron, Brown and Peter Mandelson.

■ The Coalition, C4, Sat, March 28.

Gina McKee is to play the title character in hot French playwright Florian Zeller’s play The Mother, using a new translation by Christopher Hampton.

The Mother, on stage at the Theatre Royal Bath’s award-winning Ustinov Studio from May 21 to June 20, emerged as a breakthrough drama for Zeller, the current enfant terrible of French theatre, in 2011.

Director Laurence Boswell and McKee will explore the psychology of a woman praying for her favoured grown-up son to return home. Last year, the Ustinov staged an acclaimed production of another of Zeller’s plays, The Father (on at the Tricycle Theatre, London, from May 7).

Kit Harington and Jessica Chastain are on a collision course in exciting young film-maker Xavier Dolan’s next picture, The Death And Life Of John F. Donovan. Chastain’s journalist destroys the career of Harington’s film star character (Donovan) when she discovers letters he has written to an 11-year-old. The movie will be shot next year, once Harington completes filming Game Of Thrones.

In May, Harington will be seen in Spooks: The Greater Good, a feature film based on the much-missed (by me, anyway) TV series from Kudos and BBC television. Dolan’s Cannes prize-winner, Mommy, opens here today.