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Thanks to the success of TV drama Bodyguard, interest in the profession has never been higher.

But Jacquie Davis was involved long before the show hit our screens, having become the UK's first ever female bodyguard when she got started more than three decades ago.

Here, she tells Sky News about the real-life glamour and excitement of life on the job - but also some of the misconceptions people might have, and the sacrifices she has had to make to reach the top.

I've been around the world several times - private jets, five and six star hotels, Michelin star restaurants.

I've looked after pop stars, royal families from the Middle East, and top CEOs.

I've smuggled a client out of a Turkish hotel to avoid widespread riots, dressing them up as chefs and porters and using a staff minibus to sneak them to the airport.

And I've been stabbed twice and shot at several times.

These are just some of the things I've been able to do in more than 30 years as a bodyguard.

But it's not all excitement and glamour, in any way shape or form.

The reality is you could just as easily spend your time sitting in a hotel corridor for 12 hours, counting the minutes away.

It's not always the job people think it is.

In my case, I had started as a police officer in the 1970s but realised very early on that there was this very different world of private security out there.

I decided to pursue that route because there were no women those days who were doing it and I thought I would be able to do lots of different things.

From surveillance to undercover work, I quite liked the idea of picking and choosing what I wanted to do.

The training lasted about six weeks and was pretty rigorous, but it was a good thing. It taught me an awful lot.

The guys were actually quite glad to have me, and I brought a lot of skills to it than a man wouldn't typically have.

There's a desperate shortage of females in this line of work, and I'm always banging the drum for girls to come and do close protection.

Careers advice teachers aren't mentioning bodyguards, so I don't think a lot of young girls know about it.

They've got the softer skills you often need, because a lot of our job is diplomacy. Women don't have this testosterone, where guys can be a bit bullish, and it helps.

Women are natural nurturers and naturally look after, so they can bring some great skills.

And in my case, it has been helpful that I don't stand out in the lingerie department in Harrods.

You might laugh, but that sort of thing can be important in this line work of work because you need to blend into the background.

It's very different to the stereotype in that sense - these big, burly men going about their work in suits and sunglasses.

People also don't understand that there's a whole intelligence team feeding you information. And you've got surveillance teams. It's not just the person you see as the bodyguard, there's a whole team in the background.

Look at the Bodyguard series on the BBC - it was an excellent drama, but it did get a bit far-fetched as it went on.

I've had to sack people before for getting too close or into a relationship with a client, like what happens in the show, but it has always been men. I have never sacked a woman for it.

I suppose that's the artistic licence you give them in the TV world, as I have learned through consulting on a film called Close, which is coming to Netflix.

Vicky Jewson, the writer and director, had read a book I'd written and approached me about it.

The character is based on me, played by Noomi Rapace, and I had the pleasure of training her. She was so good I'd give her a job!

Vicky really wanted an all-action female character and once she wrote the script she sent it to me and I would say we don't do it this way, we did it this way, and that sort of thing.

There is the odd real thing that happened in it, the script is fiction.

Again, this world is not all excitement and glamour.

I've been doing this for over 30 years and it has taken its toll, certainly when I working undercover when my mum died.

At that stage I had done a lot of undercover work and if you asked me what my real name was I probably couldn't have told you.

It was then that I went back to work in the police for five years, just so I could return to some semblance of a normal life. I could be me and not pretend to be someone else all the time.

But then I went back on the circuit, back to close protection and surveillance work.

I missed the jobs, I missed the travelling - one of my most memorable was the rescue of a pregnant British woman, who had been kidnapped in Pakistan.

Just before the rescue, former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto, who I had protected before, recognised me at the hotel and a few hours later I got an anonymous phone call saying "get out, they know why you're there".

But we weren't leaving without the hostage, so we smashed in, grabbed her and left. We had to walk for three days, sleeping in the day and walking at night through the Himalayas to escape to India. The woman, who was pregnant, had been beaten, starved and raped for three months and was wearing a pair of flip flops, was a real hero.

So I was really keen to get back to the circuit, because I knew my skills would be stretched and I had much more to learn.

Now I run the corporate protection and surveillance teams - passing on my knowledge to those coming up behind.