PATRICIA Heaton is your everyday knockabout mum. She runs about every morning frantically getting her four boys ready before ferrying them off to school or one of their various sporting commitments.

PATRICIA Heaton is your everyday knockabout mum. She runs about every morning frantically getting her four boys ready before ferrying them off to school or one of their various sporting commitments.

She loves being a mum but don’t for a moment think the money she has made from a healthy television career is being used to raise her children with a silver spoon in their mouth.

“There is a line in our show where the kids ask for something and I say, ‘Wrong family’,” Heaton, 51, says from the Hollywood set of her latest TV offering The Middle, which premieres next Monday.

Heaton has four sons with her husband David Hunt – Sam, 16, John, 14, Joe, 12, and Daniel, 10.

The Middle is a comedy series revolving around a Mid-Western American family. Heaton plays leading character Frankie Heck, who is frantically juggling three children, a job at a car dealership and husband Mike (Scrubs star Neil Flynn).

“There was an episode where Frankie is getting bugged on the phone by someone at her kids’ school and I was at work getting bugged by someone at one of my boys’ schools and I was like, ‘I can’t believe I am actually living it and shooting it at exactly the same time’,” Heaton recalls.

“Raymond had a little bit of edge and this has a little bit too. I felt for a long time since Roseanne isn’t on or Malcolm In The Middle there hasn’t been a show like this for families.”

Like most mothers, Frankie is constantly multi-tasking, something Heaton understands only too well.

“It’s almost become like a sickness,” she says. “I feel like if I am lying down and not doing anything or only focusing on one thing that there is something wrong, like I really should be doing a bunch of things. I am constantly on my iPhone emailing schools and making doctors’ appointments and scheduling while I am working.”

Because Heaton is in nearly every scene of The Middle, her workload is far more hectic than it was on Raymond. Given the 12-hour days, she is grateful her children are old enough to cope.

The actress is also not shy to admit she has hired help to keep everything in order.

“Ever since I had children I’ve been used to getting by on six hours sleep a night, so that’s not a big deal, it’s more about how much time you can get with the kids,” she says.

“I am normally home for dinner, or if I work late I am there for breakfast. We’ve had to staff up a little bit because we were flying solo there for a while and now we’ve had to get people to help us manage the homework and the food, all that kind of stuff.”