Let it lie

Sharon Small, co-star of new BBC psychological thriller Trust Me, talks to Janet Christie about the Edinburgh-set drama, sexism in TV and the perils of being mistaken for Maxine Peake. Portrait by Debra Hurford Brown

Sharon Small tells Janet Christie about her new Edinburgh-set medical drama, Trust Me

If you’re ever in a situation where someone asks if there’s a doctor in the house, don’t be surprised if some of those racing forward to assist turn out to be total frauds. Not so much medical professionals, as actors who may once have played the role of a doctor and identified too much.

“God, I can keep someone alive.” says Sharon Small, recounting the research she did for her latest role as a doctor in BBC1’S Trust Me, a psychological thriller filmed in Edinburgh starring Jodie Whittaker (yes, that doctor) who assumes the identity of a doctor.

“We were shown how to fit a line in, do stitch and sutures, how to clear airways, how to intubate, how to do heart compression. And you do think, I could keep someone alive, that would be amazing.” She laughs, under no illusion as to the gap between reality and fiction.

“But that’s the joy of acting, isn’t it?” says the Fife-raised performer. “Whatever the character’s job, you always think that in another life I would have been so good at that.” She laughs. “In practice, it’s an illusion.”

With a career spanning 30 years, Small has covered a variety of jobs, from detective sergeant to midwife, in roles that have made her a familiar face in The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, Mistresses, and more recently in Stonemouth and Call The Midwife.

“For Trust Me we did a fantastic day with the writer Dan Sefton, who is a practising Emergency Department doctor, and also with an ED doctor in a Scottish hospital. We went round the department and watched. It really struck me that everybody was always doing something, even when you thought they weren’t, they were reading charts, conferring, and he was listening all the time, aware of someone’s heartbeat or coughing. He said it’s the quiet ones you have to worry about, because when they go quiet there’s something wrong.”

As mother to two boys, Leo, 11 and Zac, nine, Small is no stranger to A&E, the last occasion being when her elder son tripped over a guy rope on a campsite and broke his elbow.

“His arm was like a weird squiggle. But the good thing is it was a school camp and among the other parents there were four doctors and a midwife so they just leapt into action and I didn’t have to do anything.” Is she sure they were genuine? She laughs. “Yeah, next time I’ll double check, but you don’t do you? That’s what Trust Me is about and it’s tense. Because as an audience you’re in on the secret and ultimately you’ve started to like Jodie Whittaker’s character so you’re on her side. But you know what she’s doing is wrong and she could get caught, which adds to the tension.”

It’s not all beads of sweat and buckets of blood though, as Small’s character Brigitte manages to have fun despite the serious environment of her working life.

“She was a bit of light relief because she had a bit of fun about her and I realised I’d been doing a lot of things like Call The Midwife, where I would be crying. Mums at the school would say, ‘Aw, saw you crying a lot last night’. I tend to get a lot of dramatic roles, or ditzy ones, but Brigitte is good fun and a woman that’s my age. She’s quippy and fast-talking, I think because she’s in a tense situation – their job is to keep people alive till they get them to the operating room. But Brigitte has a secret too…”

You’ll have to watch Trust Me to find out what that is, because unlike Jodie Whittaker’s whistleblowing character, Small’s not saying.

With work often taking her away from her north London home on location, her partner photographer Dan Bridge often does the bulk of the childcare, a situation that has attracted reverse sexism on occasion.

“Because Dan has been the primary carer he’s been with the boys while I’ve been away. I remember asking if he was going to go to one of the coffee mornings, and he said no, that would be the last shred of his masculinity. I think things have shifted a bit now, but people used to say, so when is Dan going back to work? and I used to think no-one would ask me that.”

Filming Trust Me in Edinburgh allowed Small to get home for weekends and a harmonious worklife balance was achieved with plenty of Facetime calls and the children are used to their mother working away. Sooner or later she is hoping to clock up a performance that they will be able to watch without being traumatised, having been maimed, paralysed, shot and killed more than once, not to mention all that on-screen sobbing.

“I’ve just been channelling a Glaswegian crack whore in the