Maxine Peake as
DS Vickie Clarke
Maxine Peake hasn't stopped working for the last three years.
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With her role as Veronica, the lairy and lovable neighbour in the
hit Channel 4 drama Shameless, followed by the 成人快手 drama Faith
and a stage play at the Royal Exchange, Peake is now back to work on
the third series of Shameless and has never been happier.
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"With acting, it is always difficult to find time for a break because
you never know when your next job is going to come up.
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"I love working and I've had such a great time working between
television and theatre, but a holiday would be fantastic," she muses.
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Vickie is a new addition to the team and has been around for about
six months. She is on her first assignment which is the investigation
into Isabel Price's suicide.
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She sees some pretty gruesome sights, but despite all her retching
and shaky hands, she takes it in her stride.
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"Vickie has to remove a ring from a corpse's hand and is shaking in
her boots, but she just gets on with it.
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"Police work is always what Vickie wanted to do and she is particularly
ambitious. She is a fast-track kid but we haven't seen her confidence
emerge yet.
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"There is a bit of tension between Vickie and Duncan. She charges
in at times and rubs him up the wrong way but he is protective of her.
She's a bit of an upstart and a maverick who trusts her intuition,"
she says.
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This is Peake's first role as a police officer but she didn't have
to look too far for inspiration.
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"I've been out with Lisa and her work colleagues so I'm familiar
with the whole set-up.
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"She's not like Vickie, although she did do some undercover work
in licensing for a while, but I didn't really have to call her up and
ask advice all the time," she explains.
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"I do expect she will get quite a bit of stick at work because of
me playing a DS and I'm sure they will all be quite vocal in telling
me what I did wrong - but I don't mind."
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Despite having a sister in the force, Peake never wanted to be a police
officer herself and in fact when Lisa broke the news to the family she
was nervous that her grandfather, a lifelong union man, would be upset.
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"I remember being embarrassed by the fact that she was going to join
up - but I soon saw a whole different side to the police force.
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"There isn't the same respect for the police that there used to
be and what Lisa and her colleagues go through, particularly on a Saturday
night in Manchester, is appalling. I have huge admiration for her,"
she adds.
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"She's been punched and kicked and had takeaway food chucked in her
face, and dealing with drunken people at the weekends is just a nightmare.
I don't know how she does it without losing her temper.
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"That's not to say I made it easy for her when she was joining up,"
she laughs.
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"I remember they sent a sergeant round to the house to interview
the family and I had an African awareness pendant on, trainers with
an anarchy sign drawn on and a CND badge.
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"I was a right little rebel. He just ignored my attempts at anarchy
and carried on chatting to us."
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Peake has been overwhelmed at the success of Shameless and how it has
touched people, particularly in the North West.
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"I would be walking along the street and people would stop me to congratulate
me on the drama - from men in suits with briefcases to little old ladies
and bin-men. They all seemed to love it.
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"The success of Shameless really took all of us by surprise because
initially we didn't know what we had on our hands. It was a different
style of acting and it was made very quickly on a pretty small budget
and not like anything I remember seeing on telly.
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"But with Paul Abbott's work you always know you have a gem."
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Despite being one of the UK's hardest-working television actresses,
Peake doesn't hanker after the Hollywood lifestyle or trappings of fame.
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"I would love to do a good gritty British movie of some kind but there
are so few about. I also would love to do more theatre - I used to prefer
theatre because you had six weeks' rehearsal and then if you cocked
it up one night you always had the next to get it right again, but I
really enjoy telly now.
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"Television, ironically, used to make me more nervous than theatre
- but I feel I'm getting the hang of it."
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Ironic coming from the girl who hasn't had a break from television
acting for the last three years!
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