SIOBHAN JOINS SUN HILL (12/05/07)

From The Sun newspaper:

THE BILL’s latest recruit Siobhan Redmond is loving being on the show – she just wishes she had slightly better costumes!

Sun Hill viewers may recognise Siobhan from the groundbreaking cop drama Between The Lines, in which she played lesbian detective sergeant Mo Connell – one of the first major UK dramas to have a gay female lead.

And now she’s back in the world of policing as Sun Hill’s new crime scene examiner Lorna Hart.

“Lorna’s a bit of an enigma,” Siobhan told Sun online. “Not because she is inherently mysterious, but because we only see her at her work and so I can’t tell you anything about her private life!”

“She makes reference to the fact that she can’t go for a drink because she can’t get a babysitter but whether that means she has one child, two children, 17 children I just don’t know.

“Or maybe she’s just lying because she doesn’t want to go for a drink with them!”

Viewers may not get to see much of Lorna’s private life, but she is soon in the thick of the action at work, helping to crack the case of a valuable necklace stolen at a funeral home.

“Because her work is at crime scenes, she mainly wears one of those white boiler suits. I look like Antarctica with a face most of the time I am in The Bill,” she laughs.

“I look enormous in the white suit. But then most people look enormous in them.”

The classically-trained actress says that being in The Bill is a great job.

“I have a delightfully relaxed schedule compared to everyone else who works on the show because you can’t have the crime scene examiner there all the time going “ah, I can tell from this paw print here la, la, la’,” she says.

“So I just have to swan in for one or two days a week while everyone else is slaving away. And I tell them I’ve been to the pictures or whatever and I’ve got a life and they tell me to shut up.”

And the Glaswegian actress, who has also starred in Holby City, Bulman and The Smoking Room, reveals that this is not the first time she has appeared in ITV’s long-running cop soap opera.

“Like everyone else with an Equity card, I have already done an episode of The Bill. It must have been about 15 years ago,” she says.

“I think I had three lines, and each one of my lines came with a different Irish accent I’m afraid.”

And she also had a chance to get to know a Sun Hill legend – the one and only DI Burnside, played by Chris Ellison.

“I remember talking about boxing – like I know anything about boxing – with DI Burnside and I remember him looking at me with those piercing eyes and going ‘you’re not interested in boxing, are you’? and I had to admit, ‘no, not really’.”

This time around, her pal on set is a real-life forensic examiner who gives her advice on the technicalities of the job.

“Malcolm, who does this for a living and advises on set, gave me some special cotton gloves to wear inside my rubber gloves so I didn’t get finger rot – which is apparently the consequence of wearing rubber gloves all day long,” she says.

“Boiler suits, finger rot… Ah, the glamour of showbiz. Obviously I’m wearing a shimmering ball gown underneath!”