Tara Fitzgerald has a strange confession to make… She loves it when her forensic pathologist character, Dr Eve Lockhart, in BBC1 series Waking the Dead, has to mess around with maggots! "We hadn’t had maggots for a while and I had forgotten how much I enjoy working with them," explains the 41-year-old star, who’s character had to examine a decaying body, complete with hundreds of maggots crawling about, for this Sunday's first episode of the new series. "They were all contained in the eye socket, they didn’t even look like maggots, but when you poked them they all came streaming out. It was rather beautiful in a weird way," she remembers. "Eve has a pet rat as well in this series, Hannibal. That thing about working with animals and children… I am quite happy to work with animals, they are fascinating and you can get your hands dirty and I like that. It is not just academic, it actually feels very real when you are poking a few lava around."
