The star of the Kay Mellor lottery drama reveals five secrets from the set

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1

My character Cheryl is the salt of the earth, a hard worker who is smitten with a bit of a wrong ’un – her fiancé Frank, played by Neil Morrissey. He loves his Irish wolfhound Duke [inset] more than Cheryl and is in Monaco with a stolen winning lottery ticket that was bought from the newsagents they run by a group of kennel workers. Having found him, Cheryl makes some surprising decisions.

2

This is the first TV project of my mum Kay Mellor’s that I’ve acted in for 13 years, but I’m always involved in her work. A few years ago, she had so many projects on that she became ill and that’s when I started helping her out with writing. I auditioned for the part of Cheryl along with everyone else and the BBC had the final casting decision.

3

As it’s about kennel workers, there were lots of dogs on set.

If you gave one dog a treat after doing a scene, they’d all come running up demanding theirs – it felt like you were under attack!

4

For Covid reasons, we had two crews filming different scenes simultaneously – an unusual way to make a drama. It meant everything was shot out of sequence. Scenes that go next to each other in the series were sometimes filmed months apart and I had to write loads of notes on my scripts as to where I was emotionally when I started and finished a scene.

5

Filming in Monaco felt like a treat but in our second week there was a curfew so we had to be in our hotel rooms by 8pm and night shoots were scrapped. But we were in a beautiful hotel with a balcony overlooking the sea. Many of us had to cancel holidays, so we appreciated how lucky we were.

Cheryl, with her colleague Taj (Sabrina Sandhu)