The new Lewis
Sorcha Groundsell grew up in the Outer Hebrides, so was right at home taking the lead in a crime drama set on the islands
Black Camel Pictures / BBC Alba / John Murdo MacAulay
- Gareth McLean
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When Sorcha Groundsell got the part of family liaison officer Kat Crichton, the lead in BBC4’s latest dark and moody subtitled detective drama An t Eilean/The Island, which is set on the island of Lewis and Harris, she thought she knew what to expect. After all, she’d had small parts in His Dark Materials and Shetland and, at the ripe old age of 20, landed the lead in Netflix’s Norway-set supernatural thriller The Innocents.
Now nearly 27, she recalls being 14 and one day waking up “and there it was in my head that I wanted to act. To this day, it’s a complete mystery as to where it came from.” Ever since, Groundsell has focused on making her dream a reality. What she hadn’t expected was to have her picture on billboards across the UK, beside motorway slip-roads and on the sides of buildings, as part of a major advertising campaign.
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“That is… something,” Groundsell says, self-consciously. From Stornoway to Slough, Aberdeen to Acton, you can see giant Groundsells staring off into the middle distance in an anorak, every inch a Scandi-noir police officer of the kind that have made BBC4 their home since the scowling great Dane Sarah Lund investigated the murder of Nanna Birk Larsen in 2011’s The Killing.
I went to a Gaelic school – all my education was in Gaelic
Sorcha Groundsell
Except, of course, Groundsell isn’t Scandinavian and An t-Eilean/The Island’s subtitles don’t translate Danish, Norwegian or Swedish. Groundsell is British and those subtitles translate from Gaelic, a language she has been fluent in since she was a child.
“Until I was nine, we lived on Lewis and then we moved to Glasgow, where I went to a Gaelic school, so all my education was in Gaelic,” she says. In Glasgow, Groundsell still felt connected to the Outer Hebrides. “Most of my friends growing up had connections with the islands, either historically or more recently.”
It wasn’t until her late teens that she realised how other people might view her childhood as unusual. “That took moving to London [when she was 18], where I came across more and more people who didn’t know where the Outer Hebrides were or that we had our own particular language,” she says. “I used to get the occasional questions like ‘Do you have electricity there?’ that were sometimes patronising, but mostly people are just really interested.”
She hopes that An t-Eilean/The Island – the biggest-budget Gaelic-language drama to date – generates similar interest in the language, which is spoken by less than three per cent of the Scottish population. Groundsell goes as far to say that she hopes that it may cause “some sort of uprising… Don’t worry – you’re not going to have a coup on your hands from the Gaels, but there has been such a surge in interest in Gaelic,” she says, proudly. “I’ve certainly had a lot of messages from people since the show’s come out [it first aired on BBC Alba and on iPlayer last month] who have maybe just started learning Gaelic or have maybe been inspired to reconnect with it off the back of seeing the show, which is just the most gratifying thing I could possibly think of.”
Groundsell baulks at the term “actor-vist” but is proud to bang the drum for Gaelic. “I suppose that’s the message I keep harping on about: use it or lose it.” And it’s a message that Groundsell tells herself.
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“It’s difficult to hold on to a language when you aren’t surrounded by it every day. And the further away you go from where it’s spoken, the harder it is to be surrounded by it. But with that bit of distance comes the appreciation and the realisation of its value to you, certainly for me. As time has gone on and it’s been harder to find opportunities to speak it, it’s sharpened the necessity of holding on to it.”
Authors
Gareth McLean
Gareth McLean has been writing about television for nearly 30 years. As a critic, he's reviewed thousands of programmes. As a feature writer, he's interviewed hundreds of people, from Liza Minnelli to Jimmy Savile. He has also written for TV.
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