The star of the forensics crime mystery reveals five secrets from the set

LAURA FRASER TRACES Mon-tue, 9pm, BBC1

1 My character, Sarah Gordon, is a professor of chemistry at a Dundee university where Emma Hedges has taken up a post as a lab technician and is trying to find out how her mum died. Sarah (main image, above) is an expert in determining the cause of fires and I disappeared into a kind of black hole, watching Youtube videos around the subject.

2 The crime scenes visited by Sarah and her colleagues are frighteningly realistic. Sometimes I’d be taken aback when I first entered a room that’s meant to be charred by a fire – the prosthetic dead bodies were disturbingly lifelike.

3 Martin Compston, who plays Emma’s love interest Daniel Macafee (inset above), and I are both from around Glasgow but the producers wanted more refined Dundee accents for the show. Martin said he had to put on what members of his family would consider his telephone voice to play his character.

4 It has been great to have actor John Gordon Sinclair on board in the role of Emma’s estranged father Drew, who is a motorbike-riding musician.

John loved riding around and he’s also been inspired to take up the guitar again.

5 I found it really hard to memorise the lines in this series. Normally, you can make a link between each sentence in a script as there’s an emotional connection. But chemistry language can be tricky to learn and I had to work really hard to get the words into my head!