TV’s Pauline Quirke has returned to her native Hackney in a new BBC documentary in which she joins the Missing Persons Unit of Hackney Police.
The programme is being shown alongside Quirke’s TV drama Missing, in which she plays a detective sergeant in the Dover Police’s missing persons unit.
Missing Live features the Birds of a Feather actor, who was born and raised in Hackney, as she shadows real police detectives hunting missing residents.
The show, which has been broadcast on BBC One every morning this week, follows the Shoreditch-based unit as they try to trace people who have been reported missing. The unit is one of the busiest in the Hackney police force.
In the first episode, shown on Monday, the team search for two women who have escaped from the psychiatric unit of Homerton hospital. One of the women is later found near Hoxton Square.
In a later episode, the team visit the Cat and Mutton pub on Broadway Market, where missing Hackney resident Barry Walsh was last seen five years ago.
Quirke grew up in the borough and lived in Stoke Newington and Murray Grove before moving away aged 23.
She said of the experience: “I didn’t know what to expect. But the officers were smashing. Some of these people’s stories are very sad, but the team are so dedicated. They have cases that are 57 years old, but they are just as important to them.”
As well as serious police work, the series has also given the popular television star a chance to revisit places from her childhood.
“Hackney is still just the same as I remember it. It was great to go back.”
