Everything to Know About Siobhan Tarrant, Eleven-Time Teacher and Nine-Time Police Officer

The staffroom at Marlowe Road had a brown kettle with a cracked handle, and Siobhan Tarrant says it was the best piece of casting in the building. She was there for eleven weeks in 1999 as Ms Pryor, geography, sensible shoes. The school came down years ago. The kettle went to a props house in Acton and has not been seen since.

That is the first thing to know. Tarrant has played eleven teachers and nine police officers, and nothing else. No doctors, no widows, no woman on a train. Twenty parts since 1995, all of them somebody who stands at the front of a room and waits for it to go quiet.

The teachers, briefly. A supply teacher who never learns the names. A head of year with a lanyard she keeps tucking into her cardigan. A primary headteacher in a drama called The Late Bell who ends every episode by locking up alone. A chemistry teacher, 2008, who is the only one who ever raised her voice, and the voice is still talked about in certain corridors.

The police officers, equally briefly. A desk sergeant at Cuddy Lane. A detective inspector with a flask. A community officer on a bicycle in Blue Lamp Row, a series that ran for two winters and had a theme tune people still hum at bus stops. She says the bicycle was the hardest part. She had never been allowed near it as a child.

Here is where it gets sad. Almost none of the rooms exist now. Cuddy Lane station had a front counter with a brass bell and green tiles up to shoulder height. It is flats. The tiles were kept in the lobby, which the estate agent called a feature. Marlowe Road is a car park with a bench in it. The comprehensive from The Late Bell was a real comprehensive, and its science block is now a gym where people lift things in the exact spot where she once confiscated a Bunsen burner.

What she misses, she told me over tea in a café near Kentish Town, is the smell. Floor polish, wet coats, radiators that came on in October whether you wanted them or not. You could not fake it, she says, and nobody has had to try for a long time. Modern sets are clean. Modern stations, she says, have no counters to lean on.

She has kept a lanyard from each part, twenty in a biscuit tin. The tin is the one thing in her flat she will not let anyone tidy.

So is she tired of it? No. She is a little worried about the buildings, which is different. A school is a thing you are in for years and then it is a story you tell. She has been in more of them than most people and is not sure who is keeping the list.

Last month she was offered a bishop. She turned it down. 'I'd have had nothing to hold,' she said. Teachers have a register. Police have a notebook. Nobody has ever explained to her what a bishop is supposed to do with his hands.