A Brighton newsreader has turned up on the telly in a very different setting to her usual home at BBC South East Today.
Marcella Whittingdale has a brief appearance in Loch Henry, the second episode of the latest series of the dark Netflix drama anthology.
She plays to type, as a TV news reporter covering the disappearance of a young couple in a Scottish town in the 1990s.
The episode follows another young couple who visit the same sleepy town many years later to work on a nature documentary – but end up investigating the first pair’s disappearance.
She said: “I have got a friend who’s a talent agent and she asked me a while ago if I wanted to be one of those people who is a reporter on TV shows.
“I said yes and didn’t hear anything until she said this thing has come up, do an audition tape and email it off.
I didn’t know it was Black Mirror until I was there in Inveraray.”
She said she went up expecting it to be similar to TV reporting – but was totally unprepared for the difference in scale.
She said: “I wore a mac, thinking I would be standing in a field waiting for my go. But then I got to the trailer, and they asked if I wanted breakfast and the wardrobe guy brings in loads of 90s style reporter suits.
“There were people with walkie talkies saying ‘I’ve got Marcella’, make up, the director, loads of people I’m not sure what their job is. I’m really nervous because there’s so many people and I’m not used to it because it’s usually just me and the cameraman.
“I almost couldn’t stop laughing because it was so different to being a real reporter.
“It was great fun.”
The shoot was last September, and the Black Mirror producers required her to sign a non-disclosure agreement, so by the time it appeared on Netflix, she had almost forgotten it.
But this week, she’s had loads of messages from people saying they’ve spotted her on screen.
She now has an acting page on IMDB – and hopes to add to it with more reporter roles in the future.
She said: “For a first acting job, it’s pretty cracking. I would like to do more. I count my self extremely lucky and thrilled to have done it.
