Mother and Country: Jill Scott is No. 1

“I love ironing out the mystery,” Jill Scott enthuses, though she’s not talking about playing detective Precious Ramotswe in HBO’s new dramedy, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.



Rather, it’s the Nancy Drew books of her childhood she’s remembering, before going on about her can’t-miss police dramas, the Law & Orders, the CSIs and Medium.



“I love them all,” she says. “I didn’t really put it together until now: the shows that hook me are the ones where you have to find out this great mystery at the end.”



Filmed entirely in Botswana and based on Alexander McCall Smith’s novels, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency chronicles the adventures of the wily proprietor of the only female detective agency in the country. A coproduction with the BBC, the spirited and sassy whodunit has received warm reviews in the U.S. and Britain.



After filming the two-hour pilot in 2007, Scott was set to return to Africa last fall to film the remaining episodes. Then she learned she was pregnant.



“It was the day of. I found out at ten o’clock in the morning," Scott recalled. "The car was going to pick us up at twelve o’clock to get to the airport. I had been told that I couldn’t get pregnant, ever, so this was huge,” says the Grammy-winning Philadelphia-born songstress.



In the end, Scott got her doctor’s okay to travel to Botswana, where she was met with erratic rains and temperatures reaching 113 degrees before noon.



“And of course, I was in my first trimester, so there was morning sickness, exhaustion — all the stuff that goes with being pregnant.”



Impending motherhood, as it turns out, helped Scott connect with Ramotswe’s endearing ties to her homeland, which, unlike southern Africa, was unaffected by apartheid.



“I looked at her as loving her country the same way I love my child, to the point where she’d do anything for it.”



Filming abroad didn’t keep Scott from exercising her own love of country. During the presidential election, “I voted at the American embassy, and I felt such a pride and excitement,” she reports.



Her pride and excitement are now playing out in her new home in Los Angeles, where at press time she and her fiancé, drummer John (“L’il John”) Roberts recently welcomed a baby boy, Jett Hamilton Roberts.



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As published in Emmy Magazine (Issue No. 2, 2009)

Story: Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn