Fay Ripley, had never wanted to star in a cop drama until she was sent the details of Suspects. Now she’s on the hunt for bad guys

IT wasn’t the script that made Fay Ripley jump at the chance to star in new Channel 5 crime drama Suspects. In fact, it was the complete lack of one. The night before filming, instead of learning lines, the former Cold Feet actress and her co-stars would receive a document with some details of a crime and its resolution. They would then have to come up with their own dialogue, as their characters tackled a range of hard-hitting cases.

“It was down to us lot to sift through the evidence, untangle the DNA and interview the hell out of a load of arsey criminals who made an Olympic sport out of lying to us,” explains the actress, who plays Detective Inspector Martha Bellamy.

Set in London and co-created by The Bill’s executive producer Paul Marquess, each of the ten episodes tells a self-contained crime story – from the hunt for a serial rapist to the shooting of a clergyman. Being Human actor Damien Molony and Clare-Hope Ashitey, who’s previously appeared in Channel 4 drama Top Boy, play the two detectives working under Ripley.

“We investigated these crimes in real time, basically. If somebody goes missing in a police station, you don’t have time to have a cup of tea and a biscuit, or frankly, even a wee,” says Ripley.

“We were doing the interviews back-to-back, we were discussing what the evidence was, we were getting out there, getting in police cars, putting on blue lights and trying to find the person who’s taken the kid, burnt the house down or shot someone in the head... You’re running on adrenaline.”

Like the actress, Bellamy is warm, witty and strong-minded. She’s also rather bossy, which Ripley admits wasn’t much of a stretch to play.

“I wouldn’t have done well if I was in a lower position,” she confesses. At times, the pressure got too much (“I cried a lot initially, off screen”) but there were lighter moments too. “Being serious a lot of the time isn’t really in my DNA,”

she says.

“Because we were overtired and overworked, we were really giggly. You could just see everyone going, ‘There’s no time for laughing, there are dead people everywhere, stop laughing’.”

So how would she fare as a real-life detective?

“As a detective inspector, you have to step back from the reality of crime and do your job objectively, but I’m not sure I could,” she says.

“I think I’d be too much of a mum. During filming, I had to stop myself telling a hardened killer to stop being a silly billy, and a kidnapper to sit on the naughty step.”

Her maternal instinct did prove helpful at times, however. “My heart would sink when I saw, ‘Oh God, the kid’s missing, the kid’s dead’.

But you bring that to the table and think, ‘Ok, as a mum, how would I react? I’d want to find out who did it very quickly. And so that’s how we’d investigate it.”

Aside from a guest role playing a corrupt copper in BBC series Hustle, Ripley has avoided police dramas. As a viewer, she prefers real crime shows to the “ever-slicker deluge of crime dramas around”.

The actress recalls how, after watching an episode of Suspects, she switched on “one of the nation’s favourite police shows”, as she puts it.

“Next to what we’ve done, I have to say it felt dated. There’s a sort of comfortable-ness about police dramas that everybody’s got into, I think Suspects does cut through it. It’s not personal, it’s shot as a documentary and for that reason, it keeps it quite fresh and modern. I think that’s what people want now.”

  • Suspects, Channel 5,Wednesday, 10pm