The Bay star Morven Christie on learning Lancashire lingo

Actress Morven Christie has revealed how she perfected her Lancashire accent as she returns to The Bay.

The Scots star says she listened to recordings of people from Morecambe before starting on the ITV crime drama.

The Helensburgh-born star drew on a mixture of voices to strike the right note in her role as DC Lisa Armstrong in which she returns for the second series of the thriller.

She said: “I very rarely get to work in my own accent so I’m quite used to working with accents.

“Obviously, I had already done one season of this so I’d worked on it already but I used an accent coach for a bit before season one. And I just used lots of recorded voices of people from Morecambe of various ages.

“I kind of amalgamated them into something that felt like the right kind of age because different ages have different ‘accent-isms’ in there.”

The Bay returns later this month with a plotline about a murder in an upmarket area of the coastal town after the first series attracted seven million viewers. And Morven, who also starred in Grantchester, The A Word and The Replacement, revealed that the first series of the show was so popular it inspired a walking tour of the north west seaside town – with an unexpected highlight on the route.

A key scene in the first series was a passionate encounter in an alleyway between her DC Armstrong and a character called Sean Meredith (played by Jonas Armstrong) who later emerged as a suspect in the case she was investigating. Morven said: “People were interested enough in the show for there to be The Bay-themed walking tours set up around the town, where tourists could visit key sites from series one.

“The tour was proving very popular and one of the highlights was a visit to the little alley behind a pub where Lisa had become extremely intimate with Sean after meeting him inside the pub.

“I won’t tell you the nickname the locals have now given the alley, but it shows that people had watched that particular scene quite closely!” she laughed.