SARAH Parish’s acting CV is a roll call of sexy and sassy women in dramas like Cutting It and Mistresses.
But now the TV favourite has embraced a whole new brand of female-empowerment for a comedy role.
Sarah is almost unrecognisable in ITVX’s new six-parter, Piglets.
With a short, grey wig and dowdy uniform, Sarah plays no-nonsense Superintendent Julie Spry in a fictional police training college.
The cop caper’s promo reads: “The government’s stated policy of recruiting 20,000 new police officers in double quick time has not come at the cost of lowering standards. Or has it?
“Piglets’ follows a newly recruited group of six very different would-be cops and the handful of key staff whose thankless task it is to knock them into some kind of shape.”
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It comes from the award-winning teams behind legendary comedies Smack The Pony and Green Wing.
Friday Night Dinner legend Mark Heap plays Superintendent Bob Weekes alongside Sarah, whose job it is to oversee the training of the next batch of new recruits.
Those new recruits are Steph (played by Callie Cooke), Leggo (Sam Pote), Geeta (Sukh Kaur Ojla)
Afia (Halema Hussain), Dev (Abdul Sessay) and Paul (Jamie Bisping).
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Working alongside Superintendents Julie Spry and Bob Weekes are Head of Admin Melanie
(Rebecca Humphries) and police trainers Mike & Daz (Ukweli Roach and Ricky Champ).
Sarah’s first TV appearance was in a cult advert for Manchester-based brewery Boddingtons in 1994, when she was Vera, who likes nothing better than “a good rub down with chip fat”.
It led to a series of roles as Northern women, including Dawn Rudge in Peak Practice and Allie Henshall in Cutting It, plus GP Katie Roden in Mistresses.
More recently she was in Netflix original Stay Close.
On the silver screen she starred alongside Debra Messing in the movie The Wedding Date and had a small role in the Holiday with Jude Law.