Nina Singh, the Art Detectives actress who steps into the title of Dalziel and Pascoe

Nina Singh

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	1996 England, UK
Occupation	Actress
Known for	The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Count the detectives. Almost every part that has taught viewers Nina Singh’s name has come with a warrant card or a reporter’s notebook, and almost every one has placed her a step behind an older lead: the niece chasing a story while her uncle chases a killer, the constable who drives too fast while her boss sniffs the varnish on old paintings. The next one puts her name in the title. As Detective Sergeant Paige Pascoe in ITV’s new Dalziel and Pascoe, the British actress inherits half of one of the best-known double acts in English crime fiction, and the open question about her career is whether the junior partner can become the reason people tune in.

The career behind that question is short, and it moved faster than most. At drama school, the student productions gave her parts far from any police procedural. She played Varya, the adopted daughter who keeps the keys in The Cherry Orchard, and, more tellingly for an actress later cast as the eager sidekick, Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra.

Born in 1996, she graduated from East 15 Acting School with a BA in acting in 2021 and was working on screen within a year. Her television debut was Tash, across two episodes of the Sky time-loop thriller The Lazarus Project in 2022, followed by a single episode of the psychological thriller The Ex-Wife. In 2023 came a run of guest work in the kind of programmes British actors pass through on the way up: three episodes of The Chemistry of Death, the opening episode of Beyond Paradise, an episode of Waterloo Road.

Her feature debut that year was a small part with an outsized function. In Hettie Macdonald’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, adapted from Rachel Joyce’s novel, she is credited only as Garage Girl, the attendant whose story about her aunt’s recovery from cancer persuades Jim Broadbent’s retired salesman that he should keep walking. A man who set out to post a letter decides instead to cross England on foot, and the film’s whole premise turns on a few minutes at a petrol-station counter.

The break came in Bradford. In February 2025 BBC One premiered Virdee, A A Dhand’s adaptation of his own crime novels, with Staz Nair as Detective Sergeant Harry Virdee. Singh played Tara Virdee, an investigative journalist and the detective’s niece, her first role as a series regular across all six episodes. The BBC did not order a second series.

A few months later she had a second regular role, and a more prominent one. In Acorn TV’s Art Detectives, which opened in the United States in June 2025, she plays Detective Constable Shazia Malik, recruited by Stephen Moyer’s Detective Inspector Mick Palmer into a police unit that investigates crimes involving art and antiques. Acorn said the show became the most-watched new series premiere in its history; in the UK it reached U&Drama that October. Singh built Malik as an outsider to Palmer’s world. “He keeps sniffing paintings! He’s able to tell whether it’s an old painting or not by the varnish and how it smells. She’s never been in this art world,” she told TV Insider on set, describing a character who is “very headstrong, confident, and goes full steam ahead,” with stunt work to match.

There is a problem in that pattern, and it is not only hers to solve. Three crime dramas in two years have handed her three versions of the same function: the younger investigator whose energy exists to set off an older lead’s eccentricity, whose backstory arrives in fragments, and whose name comes second in the press release. The new Pascoe is described in the official synopsis as a “newly qualified, by-the-book perfectionist”, which on paper is the straight half of the partnership, paired with Kerry Godliman‘s Andrea Dalziel, the part written with the sharper edges. Even the casting quote Singh gave Deadline points that way: “I find Kerry hilarious, so I know at times I’ll struggle not to be laughing.” The gender swap at the centre of the reboot, two women where Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan once stood, is the safe change; whether Pascoe gets a point of view of her own is the risky one, and that is where her career will be read.

Away from the procedurals the work looks different. Between television jobs she has kept a foot in theatre, playing Clare in The Beautiful Future is Coming at Bristol Old Vic in 2025, and she has gone on making short films such as That Door and Idiomatic, where nobody needs her to stand beside an inspector.

The schedule for the next year is already full. ITV and BritBox announced the Dalziel and Pascoe casting in February 2026, and the six-part series, co-created by the Vera writer Colette Kane and Daisy Martey, directed by Isher Sahota and produced by West Road Pictures, was filmed in Yorkshire that spring. It will air on ITV and stream on ITVX in the UK and on BritBox in the United States and Canada; no broadcast date has been confirmed. The BBC adaptation of Reginald Hill’s novels ran from 1996 to 2007, so the remake arrives in front of an audience that remembers the originals.

Art Detectives is coming back too. Acorn TV renewed the series in July 2026 for a two-part special in December and a six-episode second season in 2027, and Moyer’s statement on the renewal singled out “reuniting with the brilliant Nina Singh”. If the schedules hold, the next twelve months will have her carrying two detective franchises at once, one with her character’s name in the title and one at the shoulder of its star. What the writers give Pascoe and Malik in those episodes will show whether they have caught up with what she has been doing inside the junior role.