Tackling Bad Guys - That’s Life For Amita

Well, with Collision and I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here finally over, a sense of normality returns to the weekly schedules with the reappearance of The Bill.

Last week I caught up with actress Amita Dhiri aka DC Grace Dasari, the other day to chat about Twist Of Fate. You can find the interview, which was originally published in the Edinburgh Evening News below.

Also, the following titles have been confirmed for the first two episodes of The Bill in 2010: 07.01.10 (ITV3 11.01.09) Be A Man and 14.01.09 (ITV3 18.01.09) Held Responsible

TACKLING BAD GUYS - THAT’S LIFE FOR AMITA

BALLET, not ‘the beat’ was Amita Dhiri’s first love. The 41-year-old who made her name in the BBC drama This Life and is today best known as DC Grace Dasari in The Bill, laughs as she recalls, “I always wanted to be a dancer, but my one defining moment came while walking behind one of my classmates on the way to ballet class, at eight o’clock in the morning.

“She was eating two Big Macs for breakfast and was as thin as a twig. I had a Ryvita in my hand and I just thought, ‘You know what? This is a battle I can never win. I’m never going to be thin enough or long-legged enough to win this one’. That was where my dreams died.”

Instead, Dhiri set her sights on being an actor and in 2007 joined the long-running police drama as the ever calm DC Dasari. However, in tonight’s episode, she finds herself dancing to a very different tune.

Twist Of Fate sees Dasari called to a Soho brothel, where she discovers a woman holding a knife to the throat of a man tied to a chair. The woman tells Dasari that after she reported her sister missing, Sun Hill CID did nothing. By going undercover herself, the woman has discovered that her sister had become a prostitute... the bound man is an obsessed client who she believes knows what happened to her sister.

“Grace is normally very cool, calm and collected, but in this one she kind of losses it a bit,” reveals Dhiri. “Normally she is the one who double checks everything. She doesn’t make mistakes. In this episode she realises that she may have made a mistake and that it is going to cost her dearly.

“Grace had dealt with the missing person case six months earlier and treated it as just another adult who had decided to just move on. She had done her work thoroughly, but not thoroughly enough for the woman holding the hostage. As the story develops, Grace realises that there is more she could have done.”

The episode, marks the return of The Bill to its new Scottish post-watershed slot on ITV3, after a break of four weeks. Dhiri is a fan of the new scheduling.

“We have always dealt with hard hitting issues but now I think we can afford to be a little sparer... we don’t need to be as gentle with our audiences. At eight o’clock you maybe had to explain it more frequently and underline things a little more often.

After the watershed you have an audience who have already put the kids to bed, put the dishes in the dishwasher and are ready to sit down with a cup of tea and concentrate. They are with you in quite a thorough way, so instead of having to keep reiterating things, you have to keep up with them and make sure you that you are not too slow for them.”

The new approach also allows writers to develop the regulars as more fully formed characters.
“You definitely see a different side to Grace in this episode,” agrees Dhiri. “You see that she doesn’t cope very well with having holes picked in her procedure and how she does thing. Although she doesn’t run away from the problem, there are a couple of moments when you do see that she is not as in control as you expect her to be.”

So, with two and a half years of pounding the Sun Hill beat now on her service record and an insight into the life of a CID officer, could Dhiri do the job for real?

“Oh God. I don’t know if I could,” she admits candidly. “I have absolute admiration for the police, but I think they deal with such difficult subjects that I don’t know if I could. The more I learn about what they have to do the more I am in awe of what them.”

The Bill: Twist of Fate, ITV3, tonight, 11pm.