by Jilly Cooper
Recently a man came to mend my washing-machine. The trouble, he explained, had been caused by dog biscuits in the filter. He then went on to boast that that morning he’d mended Princess Michael’s washing machine.
‘What was wrong with hers?’ I asked.
‘She had three gold sovereigns in her filter,’ he said.
East Enders
Part One
EASTENDERS IS A phenomenon. Twice a week, an incredible twenty-one million viewers of all ages and classes tune in to the goings-on in Albert Square. In playground and common room alike, speculation is endless. Will Michelle lose her baby? Will Dirty Den, the Queen Vic’s shifty landlord, leave his tarty wife for his dowdy mistress?
This month, EastEnders celebrates its first birthday. Being an avid fan, I visited the BBC studios at Boreham Wood where the supersoap is being made.
To my excitement, the first person I saw was Leslie Grantham who plays Dirty Den. Wearing a peacock blue shirt, he was prowling through a crowd of schoolgirls. I was staggered that they totally ignored the nation’s number one heart-throb until I realised they were the cast of Grange Hill going for their elevenses.
Up in the press office, the telephones rang constantly. Judy Curren, the assistant press officer, serene in a dark blue jersey, needs the skill of a Peter Shilton to deflect a press ravening for scandal about the cast. The Sun has been ordered to have an EastEnders story in the paper every day.
My heart sank when Judy told me that for this reason Leslie Grantham was not prepared to be interviewed. He felt he had been over-exposed recently.
At that moment, Roly the Queen Vic’s poodle, still with his orange baby fur, trotted in looking for company. He was missing his friend, Willy the pug, who was not on the set today.
Both dogs, said Judy, got a vast fan mail, and would have made a fortune in stud fees, but sadly they’d been neutered – presumably to stop the Sun writing about their sex lives.
To make up for not meeting Dirty Den, I was taken to see Peter Dean. He plays Pete Beale, Dirty Den’s best mate, a caring goody who mans a fruit and veg stall in Albert Square and wears a hideous tweed hat like an inverted flower pot.
In the flesh he is very attractive, dark blond, with denim blue eyes, a boxer’s flattened nose and hunky body, long muscular legs, and bare feet, because Wardrobe had lost his socks. The schedule for EastEnders, he admits, is punishing. The actors work six days a week, rehearsing Monday, Tuesday and Saturday, recording inside from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Wednesday and Thursday, and filming exterior shots in Albert Square on Friday. Sunday, the one day off, is devoted to learning lines.
Working so flat out, it’s not surprising the cast look authentically drawn and disadvantaged.
‘Rudolph Hess has ’ad more free time than me in the past year,’ said Pete cheerfully. ‘But it’s the ’appiest company; been that way from the beginning’.
A cockney like most of the cast, Pete and his family have always worked in street markets.
‘My Mum’s very proud of my acting career,’ he confessed. ‘But she does get muddled. I once acted in a play at the King’s Head pub, in Islington. A week later, I rang Mum up and told her I’d got a part in Shakespeare. “Ow”, she said, “is that the pub in the Mile End Road?” When she heard I’d landed a part in EastEnders, the phone just went dead. The whole street knew in twenty-five seconds.’
Before EastEnders, Pete always played villains. As Pete Beale, he was relieved to play a good guy for a change, but soon realised how hard it was.
‘I’m the Bobby Ewing of Albert Square. Cath and I are Mr and Mrs Nice Guy, which can so easily become Mr and Mrs Boring.’
To the uninitiated, in the story, Cath, Pete’s wife, was raped and had a baby at fourteen, which she was too ashamed to tell Pete about, even when the dastardly Nick Cotton, the Iago of Albert Square, started blackmailing her. One of the most moving scenes was when she finally screwed up her courage to tell Pete the truth.
‘The extraordinary thing’, said Pete, ‘is that so many of the public think we’re real. Hundreds of people wrote in, warning me that Cath was being blackmailed.’
EastEnders also has an enormous appeal to children, perhaps because it shows parents in a realistic light.
‘I was mobbed at a gymkhana last summer,’ explained Pete. ‘All the kids crowded round saying: “We love you and Cath, you’re just like our Mums and Dads.” I was really pleased and said: “In what way?” They said: “You’re always acting silly between yourselves, drinking and quarrelling, and you only speak to us to tell us off or when you want us to do something.”’
Nor is it just the public who confuse the actors and the roles they play’.
‘My accountant gave me a form to fill in the other day,’ said Pete. ‘I found I’d put down my address as Albert Square.’ In real life, he and his wife live in Finchley, near Mrs Thatcher: ‘Now there’s a lady I would really love to shake by the neck.’
EastEnders like most acting jobs requires lots of hanging around: ‘I’ve been here since ten o’clock and I’ve only ’ad one line, and I effed that up by calling Cath, Gilly.’
Peter obviously has great affection and admiration for his costar, Gilly Taylforth, who plays the sullen, somewhat taciturn Cath. Imagining her like her stage character, I was wary of meeting her, but she turned out as bubbly as Goldie Hawn, sentences spilling out like coins from the jackpot. She is also much prettier off the screen, with a peachy skin, slanting eyes, soft flopping aconite-yellow hair and a gold bracelet on one slender ankle.
Cards, mostly Beryl Cook fat ladies, celebrating her thirtieth birthday were sellotaped to her dressing-room walls. She was reading a note saying: ‘Gilly, can you please sign this poster for a man named Grisly.’
Thrilled by the success of EastEnders, she finds the adulation bewildering: ‘I can’t get used to people staring at me in the street, I keep thinking my slip’s showing. And I’ve suddenly become other people’s property, women grab me at functions and tell me to kiss their ’usbands. It’s only because I’m a cockney; they wouldn’t do it to Penny Keith.’
She has perhaps remained so unspoilt by success because her staunch, undemonstrative family keep her feet on the ground.
‘My Dad never says anything about the programme except occasionally: “You was fair.” But after the scene when I had to tell Pete about the rape, he rang me at my flat. “I didn’t know we had a Bette Davis in the family,” he said, “thought you was marvellous.” I was so choked I could only say, “Where’s Mum?” Dad said: “She’s out.” He couldn’t have told me I was good in front of her.’
How did she find time to keep her flat clean?
‘With great difficulty. I ’ave a polish on Sundays. My idea of a great night out is taking four bags of washing down to the launderette.’
Back in Peter Dean’s dressing room, I found Nick Berry, who plays Pete’s son, Wicksy.
‘I’m on the set in a minute,’ he said, going towards the basin. ‘Got to clean my teeth.’
‘I clean mine fourteen times a day till my gums bleed,’ said Pete. ‘Actors are obsessed with bad breaff, terrified of offending someone. Except for Joan Collins, who so ’ated one of her costars, she always chewed garlic before their love scenes.’
We were joined by Ethel, the Queen Vic’s erratic charlady, played by Gretchen Franklyn. A cross between the White Queen, and the wily old heroine of The Lady Killers, she has the innocent eyes of a kitten, a gentle smile, and a drawling voice. She was wearing one roller in her fringe, a tweed skirt, a gardening cardigan, purple snow boots and a blue and white beach skirt.
She was so sad I wasn’t going to meet Willy the pug, she said, as though this was an experience no serious person should miss.
How had her life changed since EastEnders?
‘Not for the better,’ she said darkly. ‘I haven’t got time to go to the dentist, the doctor, the optician nor the corn plasterer. I had offered my body to medical research, but now they’ll refuse it.’
She turned to Pete and Wicksy, who was cleaning his teeth again.
I’m going to wear a most interesting hat this afternoon. A viewer left it behind in my house. People send lovely presents to Willy you know: dog chews, a set of golf balls, lots of photos of pugs. He came on Wogan with me. Wogan is a charming man, but he wouldn’t kiss Willy.’
She shook her head incredulously and wandered off.
Wicksy, exuding Colegate and handsome amiability, flashed his flawless teeth and admitted he got a huge fan mail from teenage girls. It made him feel rotten sometimes. One school girl had asked him to meet her outside her school gates in her lunch hour today. ‘She’ll be so choked when I don’t turn up.’
‘Women write asking me to bring my cucumbers round to their flat,’ said Pete. ‘But if I go to a charity do, I leave by ten. Boyfriends who’ve had a few too many get nasty and suddenly come up saying: “My girlfriend fancies you.” You may think you’re got a private life, but you ’aven’t anymore.’
Like a small boy putting on a policeman’s helmet to make the grown-ups laugh, Ethel returned to show off her interesting hat, a massive brown fur bonnet with pompoms. We all giggled. She looked delighted.
‘You’d be better off with a husky than a pug in that’ teased Wicksy.
‘Willy was a poodle when the series began,’ said Pete. ‘It’s only you shoving the pub door open with his nose so often that’s turned him into a pug.’
Like a kindly sheepdog, Wicksy guided Ethel off to do her next scene.
Down in the vast studio, wires hung down everywhere like lianas. Like rooms of a giant doll’s house, or a very un-Ideal Home exhibition waiting to be assembled, stand the interior sets of Albert Square. There was the Fowlers’ sitting room, with its dingy wallpaper, scruffy furniture and pictures that would make the Green Park Railing School look like the Tate.
Julia Smith, the producer, is a perfectionist. In Aly’s café all the ovens work. The menu on the blackboard – today it was toad-in-the-hole, mash and peas – is written in by the same actor every day to give continuity. All the machines in the launderette work, and the pub is masterly, the perfect reconstruction of a Victorian pub. They even have their own Luxford and Copley beer mats printed.
And there was the telephone on which Dirty Den makes all his fiddles and rings his mistress. If that worked, maybe I could interview that instead.
In the scene being shot, Andy the Scots male nurse, very handsome and radiating dependability, was telling Mary the Punk that she was a nice wee girl beneath all that make-up. Mary’s baby disagreed and was bawling lustily on the bed.
‘When the baby cries we usually let it cry on,’ said one of the Associate Producers. ‘It makes the scene more realistic.’
‘You’re a nice wee girl,’ bellowed Andy.
The baby bawled even louder.
‘Let’s do this scene without the baby,’ said the director.
Now it was a pub scene, and Ethel’s turn to cry over some drama with Willy. Dirty Den lounged in the doorway wearing a dark suit and a blue striped tie. Pale, cadaverous, like a sexy undertaker, he has an alsatian quality about him, something unpredictable, untamed: one would not take liberties. I had to admit he was wonderfully well constructed, but also noticed he has a bald patch shaped like a diamond.
‘He gets far the most fan mail,’ whispered the Associate Producer reverently. Perhaps they should rename the programme Denasty.
Upstairs in a glass box, Keith Harris, the senior designer, watched every scene on a monitor with the sound turned down.
‘I’m not interested in what they say, only what it looks like,’ he said. ‘I have to watch all the time in case a cameraman leaves a script on the bar. When I get out of here at ten o’clock at night, I feel like a pit pony.’
Beside him were several aerosol cans. Hairspray for aging up furniture. Anti-Flare, which sounds like something teenagers squirt on their parents’ trousers, to spray on food containers on the bar, so they don’t reflect the lights too much.
In the control room, the appropriately named vision mixer, a beautiful redhead, gazed at all the different monitors, pressing coloured buttons to change the picture. Next door to her the director, Michael Lloyd, gave advice to the actors on the floor, while listening to instructions from Julia Smith in the producer’s box.
Back in the press office, I found Nejdet Salih, the Cypriot who plays Aly, the Cypriot café owner. Known because of his sex appeal as Aly the Stallion, he looks, with his dark collarbone-length hair, big hooked nose and soulful tarmac-black eyes, more like a stocky little ram. He was wearing a black shirt, and lots of jewellery. He has great charm.
‘I love EastEnders,’ he said. ‘I live it, smell it, breathe it.’ It was in fact his first big acting break. ‘My father wanted me to be a lawyer or a doctor, and insisted I went into an office. He’d even arranged a marriage for me, but she was an ugly cow – although she might not be now,’ he added hastily. ‘So the moment my father died, I broke it off, and started going to drama classes in the evening. It’s difficult becoming an actor if you’re working class. All your mates think you’ve turned gay.’
His hands move as he talks, amethysts and gold rings flashing in the neon light.
‘Originally, they was looking for a Greek to play Aly. I turned up at the audition, I didn’t know whether to put on a posh accent. We was all so brainwashed at drama school to talk like Jeremy Irons. But I decided for once to go back to my cockney roots. Sandy Radcliffe, who plays my wife Sue in EastEnders, was late, so I turned to her and snapped: “Typical of a woman, keeping a man waiting, don’t do it again.” Everyone looked amazed, and said: “Has someone told you the story line?” So I played the part all macho.’
‘Three days later, I got a letter from the BBC. It was so complicated, I couldn’t work out if I’d got the job. I rang my agent and said: “I may have some good news for you.”’
Nej (it rhymes with Reg) is amazed he gets so much adulation from women. I always thought successful actors was tall and handsome. I’m only five foot five, but they write to me telling me I’m gorgeous and a hunk, and come and stroke my hair in the street. Shopping’s a bit difficult,’ he sighed. ‘They peer into the freezer at the supermarket, and yell: “Let’s see what he’s ’aving for his tea.” You feel guilty if it’s smoked salmon.’
What about his alleged romance with Linda Davidson, who plays Mary the Punk. Nej’s eyes flickered. He said he’d rather not talk about it.
Linda Davidson, sitting in her dressing room surrounded by cards from Nej saying he loves her, Get Well cards from Nej, and photographs of Nej, had no such reservations.
‘He’s the first boyfriend my mother’s liked,’ she said. ‘And tonight,’ she blushed under her chalk-white punk make-up, ‘he’s cooking me supper.’
‘Smoked salmon?’
‘No – cod in cheese sauce – out of a packet,’ she added dreamily. ‘Nej has got such charisma.’
Out in the passage, a large lady swept past, shouting to a group of Grange Hill boys to collect their blazers from upstairs. Her exhortations fell on deaf ears. The boys were gazing longingly at Letitia Dean (who plays Dirty Den’s wayward daughter), who was teetering past on four-inch heels, a pink fluffy sweater emphasising her forty-two-inch bust.
6.45 p.m.: It seemed like midnight. On the set – another pub scene. Sharon and Den’s wife Angie (her over-made-up face twitching with emotion) were having a row. In front of the photograph of Charles and Diana, Wicksy was flashing his teeth like Liberace’s grandson. An extra was removed for cluttering up the scene. Wicksy happily obeyed orders to move closer to Cath. Den in the hall was gazing gloomily at the wallpaper – well he might – it was hideous.
As Sharon flounced past, he grabbed her arm.
‘We’ve gotta talk, Princess.’
Idly I wondered if Prince Charles ever says that to Diana.
Back in Pete’s dressing room, Wicksy cleaned his teeth again. Pete was talking to June Brown,
the marvellous actress who plays Dot Cotton. A kind of Discount Dracula, she has a sardonic vampire’s face, an iron filings voice and thin scarlet lips which draw on endless cigarettes. All the cast bring her their problems, as she really listens.
As the mother of the fiendish Nick Cotton, who has left the show temporarily to appear in pantomime, she got lots of sympathetic letters. Her favourite came from a five-year-old.
‘Dear Dot, I’m writing to tell you, your son Nick is in Newcastle in a play. He isn’t bad anymore and didn’t mean to steal your earrings, so don’t worry Dot. P.S. Can my sister have a picture of Wicksy?’
By the coffee machine Maul and Lil, two EastEnders stallholders with peroxide hair and knowing faces, were tarting up for a night scene in the Queen Vic. Both wore turquoise cashmere jersies – ‘must ’ave come off the back of a lorry’ – and more diamanté swag than Barbara Cartland.
All the cast were lovely people, they said. It was a great team. Although, Lil added, she always brought her own knife, fork, plate and plastic champagne glass in with her because she was so terrified of catching Aids.
It was 9 p.m. In the passage, I bumped into Dirty Den. He looked shattered, his eyes black hollows in a putty-coloured face. I begged him to talk to me – just for a few minutes.
‘It’s been a sod of a day,’ he said. ‘I’ve been on the set since ten this morning. Anyway I’m terrified you’ll find out how boring I am,’ and slid like a fox back on to the set.
Linda Davidson (prettily pink-cheeked and red-gold-haired now that her punk make-up and hair dye had been washed out) and Gilly Taylforth were going home. They said how much they liked today’s director. ‘He was calm and didn’t interfere.’ Outside the control room, a technician, just off duty, said he was going to send the director a wallygram. ‘I mean he is supposed to direct,’ he added petulantly.