BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF. -- Hopefully Ray Romano won't take this the wrong way, but Patricia Heaton was intimidated by the thought of working with Kelsey Grammer.

"I felt a little shy at first," said Heaton, who has teamed with Grammer for the new Fox sitcom Back to You. "I didn't tell him, because I quickly graduated to making fun of him and giving him a lot of shtick, like I did with Ray."

Heaton, of course, played Romano's wife Debra on Everybody Loves Raymond for nine years, while Grammer's portrayal of Dr. Frasier Crane graced back-to-back legendary sitcoms Cheers and Frasier.

So was the 49-year-old Heaton implying she never was nervous about working with Romano?

"When I first met Ray, he was sitting sort of behind the door of the room I was in, like Boo Radley,' " said Heaton, referencing a character in To Kill a Mockingbird. "And I was like, 'Oh, if this is the guy, I had better not quit my day job.'

"As it turned out, Ray is very sort of unassuming. He's hugely gifted, but it took a little longer to discover Ray's gift and to realize what a talented guy he is. Kelsey is very classically trained and Ray is not."

Credentials notwithstanding, Heaton's characters seem to enjoy any opportunity to badger those famous males.

"Yeah, it's kind of what a woman's lot in life is, to continually try to improve the men around her," Heaton said.

And how is that campaign going with Grammer?

"The pilot, so far, so good," Heaton said.

Back To You sees Heaton and Grammer playing duelling co-anchors at a TV station in Pittsburgh. It has some elements of Bruce Almighty with Jim Carrey, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy with Will Ferrell, and the old Mary Tyler Moore show.

Heaton comes from a journalistic background. Her father was a sportswriter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer and her brother currently writes a column called Minister of Culture at the same newspaper. Heaton herself took journalism at Ohio State before switching to theatre.

"I used to edit news film at NBC, Channel 5 in Cleveland, in college during the summers, which just shows you in the '70s, the calibre of the news there," Heaton said.

Heaton never made it to air as a newscaster, although in the fictional setting of Back To You, she loves the ambition and vanity of her character, Kelly Carr.

But just to make sure no one confuses Kelly with Debra in a physical sense, Heaton has lightened up the colour of her hair.

"It was to help me move away from Debra, but you also have to help the audience get that out of their mind, too," Heaton said. "Nine years is a long time.

"I think blonds do have more fun. But Kelly is kind of a tough cookie, as Debra was. Especially since Kelly is a newscaster, I also felt it was important to have something soft about her. So the hair is a little soft, it's not so severe."

After all, Heaton does not want her character to be as intimidating to the audience as Kelsey Grammer was to her.

Nothing personal, Ray, you big, lovable, untrained, unintimidating goof.