ACTORS looking to get noticed should start out on Fair City - which gets a bigger audience than three years of shows at the Abbey.

While the show often is slated for some of its storylines, which included Katy being kidnapped and held in a box for over a year, it airs four times a week, 52 weeks of the year.

The actress who plays Katy, Amilia Stewart, has since appeared in the Snapper at the Gate Theatre and won the award for Best International actress for her film, Ellie, at the 1st Prodigy Film Festival Awards in the UK.

Executive Producer Brigie de Courcy said starring on the show brings actors to the attention of both casting agents and the audience.

And she said while it is hard sometimes to have to get rid of a beloved character, it is part of the show.

"It is such a platform for them. You would have to fill the Abbey Theatre, the national theatre, every single night for three-and-a-half years, every single night, to get one of our audiences.

"So the exposure for the actors to have one of our audiences, 500,000 viewers, is quite a different thing to being in the Abbey and it is something they all adore. It is something they embrace, and they all know when they come in, it never goes on forever, it can’t.”

After working on Eastenders for several years, Brigie came back to RTE in 2008 and has been with Fair City since.

And she loves the interaction with fans, who make sure to let them know when they have done something good, or something wrong.

“People write in and they get incredibly engaged with what we do. If we do make mistakes, if somebody’s eating a chocolate muffin and we knew five years ago they hate chocolate and is going to have anaphylactic shock, somebody will write in and tell us.

"So we have an audience that responds to us in a very immediate way. If we do something wrong, they will write into us again and they’ll say, ‘I didn’t like that.’ If it is something, we hold our hands up and go, ‘yes, we missed that, that’s terrible.’”