Over the Moon

by David Essex

  Or so I thought.

  25

  YOU CAN PUT THE BOY INTO THE EAST END…

  NOTHING GOES ON for ever and in 2011 one of my longest working relationships came to an end as Mel Bush and I went our separate ways. It had been thirty-seven years since he had promoted my first live tour but things had changed and I simply felt that I didn’t need a manager any more. It was purely a business decision: I still love Mel like a brother, and always will.

  I also hired a new agent, a lovely woman named Maxine Hoffman at Curtis Brown, who soon called me with an intriguing proposition. The producers of EastEnders had been in touch: would I be interested in discussing a hefty new role?

  One of my first thoughts was that Derek would have certainly advised me against it. He would have regarded a soap as very lowest-common-denominator TV, but I watched East-Enders every now and then and it appeared to me these days to be an extremely viable and credible continuing drama with a terrific pool of actors.

  In any case, what harm could a meeting do? I warily agreed to an exploratory chat.

  I went into the meeting with a completely open mind. It was obviously flattering to be considered for such a major series that plays such a big role in so many people’s lives but also I knew there would be a price to pay. I would be going into a main role in an incredibly high-profile show, with all that that entailed. In all honesty, I was happy with my life of semi-anonymity and my comfortable existence. It would take a lot for me to agree to jolt myself out of it.

  The EastEnders producers came up with a lot. As we settled down to the first of a string of meetings, they told me their ideas for the character of Eddie Moon, the father figure of one of those extended East End families that tend to populate Albert Square. The uncle of Walford mainstay Alfie Moon, played by Shane Richie, Eddie would arrive in the square and cause emotional mayhem.

  Eddie would have complex relationships with his three sons, Michael, Tyler and Anthony, and an alluring dark past. Over the ensuing weeks it would be revealed that his first wife, Maggie, had killed herself in mysterious circumstances. The eldest son, Michael, has always blamed Eddie for this death and refused to forgive him.

  I liked the sound of Eddie from the start and we began to flesh out possibilities. Rather than presenting me with a fully formed character as a fait accompli, the producers and writers were very receptive to my ideas and willing to let me shape his story. This was starting to sound like an offer I couldn’t refuse.

  I sat in a big room with the writers and we sketched out ideas. Eddie was to arrive in the square as an antiques dealer. One of his sons, Tyler, was to be a boxer, and the producers wanted Eddie to hate boxing, but I demurred: ‘No! He’s an East Ender, and if that is what his lad wants to do, he will support him.’

  As the plotlines developed I was getting more and more hooked on Eddie, and the idea of his ex-wife’s suicide being slowly and poignantly revealed as the weeks went by seemed to have huge dramatic potential. It took me about three weeks to decide, but eventually I took the plunge. OK. I was on board.

  Also playing around my mind was the thought of how much my mum would have loved me doing EastEnders. I remembered the Sundays in Guildford when I would hear the door to her room open as regular as clockwork at two in the afternoon as she came out to watch the omnibus edition. I would have given anything for her to still be around to see me in it.

  We agreed on a five-month contract. The producers would have liked me for longer but it seemed a decent commitment to me, and a lot can happen in a TV series in five months. We set a provisional date of me arriving on screen on 3 June, meaning I would begin rehearsals a few weeks earlier.

  The character of Eddie Moon was a bit of a slow burner and so the first scripts that began arriving through the post were not too onerous. They were easing me in gently, so I felt relatively prepared when I turned up for my first day of rehearsals at Elstree.

  That didn’t mean that it wasn’t intimidating. EastEnders is a big show to walk into and on my first day I realised how much the cast is one big tightly knit family. Making the programme is clearly a very intense and pressurised experience that brings everyone close together, and they all look out for each other.

  So I was nervous, and they were probably just as apprehensive about me. I was joining the cast as a sort-of big name known for a lot of other things besides acting, and I am sure they wondered just what they would get and how committed I would be. They needed to know I could walk and talk at the same time: as in everything, respect had to be earned.

  For the first few days, my main problem was getting people’s names right. I had obviously been watching EastEnders closely to bone up but this meant that I now automatically thought of everyone by their character’s names. I hate to think how many times in my first week I said, ‘Hello, Jack! Er, I mean Scott…’

  Everyone made me very welcome but initially I was pretty naïve about how everything worked. In my first week, I worked with two different directors. Finding one a little easier than the other, I went to see the producer and told him: ‘I’ll do all my scenes with the first director, please.’

  He looked at me blankly, uncomprehendingly and possibly rather pityingly, and the penny dropped. That really is not how it works. EastEnders is such a fast and furious process that each episode features not just different cast members, but a different crew and director. Whoever is there, you just get on with it.

  The intensity was unlike anything I had ever worked on before and it took me two or three weeks to get used to the show’s rhythms. But everyone in EastEnders had been the new boy once and knew what it was like, so they helped me through, and before long I found I was enjoying it.

  The punishing hours were difficult. The routine was that I had to be out of bed at 5 a.m. to be on set in Borehamwood by 7.30. I may not have had to clock in like I did at Plessey’s, but there were similarities. Some days certainly felt like piecework. The shoots would go on until they were done. When you were not shooting, you were in your dressing room, cramming lines.

  The BBC did a good job of building up Eddie’s arrival, showing short teasers between other programmes, so by the time of my on-screen debut there was a nice sense of anticipation. There was certainly a buzz when I came to film the moment that I came out of Walford station, collared a passing postie and asked him the way to Albert Square.

  After my first scene had aired, I immediately became aware of the power of EastEnders and the place that it occupies in the national psyche. For the first time in years, I was turning heads in the street again. I probably signed more autographs in two weeks than I had in two years. Eddie Moon was clearly going to be as big as I had suspected, and more so.

  Luckily, most people seemed to like Eddie. The main reaction I attracted seemed to be a lot like the one Shane Richie gets, where everyone just wants to shake your hand and talk to you like their best mate. It’s different if you play a bit of a villain, like Steve McFadden playing Phil Mitchell: I think generally people are scared to go anywhere near him.

  As I was eased in and became used to the show’s dementedly demanding schedules, the writers started to up my workload. Eddie started to get some seriously heavy storylines. There was love interest, first with Lindsey Coulson as Carol and then with Zöe Lucker as Vanessa; his valuable antiques stock was burned to a crisp in mysterious circumstances.

  Yet mostly Eddie Moon is all about his tortured and torturous relationships with his sons and his cryptic, mysterious past. As the weeks went by, the scriptwriters mercilessly ratcheted up the tension, particularly between Eddie and his twisted eldest son Michael, a man possessed of an Oedipal wish to destroy his father.

  Steve John Shepherd, who plays Michael, and I hit it off great from the outset and it was just as well, because we had to spend an insane amount of time together. On a film set, if you get through two or three pages of dialogue in a day, you generally consider it a good day. Before one shoot of EastEnders, Steve and I were confronted with thirty-eight p
ages.

  It was heavyweight stuff, as well. We weren’t just popping into the Queen Vic for a pint. The plot was that having discovered his mother’s body after her suicide as a boy, Michael had always blamed his absentee father Eddie for her death. Now my son was to embark on an evil Machiavellian plot to destroy me. This was King Lear or Macbeth relocated to Walford.

  In scenes brilliantly devised in inspired script meetings, Michael arranged for his aspiring-boxer half-brother, Tyler, to fight a psychopath that he knew would maim him, or worse; attempted to fool the credulous youngest brother, Anthony, into betting and losing all of Eddie’s money on the bout; and blackmailed Vanessa into sabotaging Eddie’s relationship with Carol. He needed to break his dad’s heart as he felt Eddie had broken his.

  These were powerful, overwhelming scripts to read, let alone to act, and inevitably I became close not only to Steve but also to Tony Discipline as Tyler and Matt Lapinskas as Anthony. When we filmed the unlicensed boxing match where Tyler’s opponent leaves him in a coma and Eddie’s world begins to fall apart, you could cut the atmosphere on set with a knife.

  Yet there was more to come. EastEnders executive producer Brian Kirkwood had asked when I joined the series if I would be OK with a storyline that gave Eddie a secret Downs Syndrome son, Craig. Obviously I was, which enabled the Moon family tragedy to take another unexpected twist.

  In a tremendous pair of episodes, Eddie first finally convinced Michael that he was not directly to blame for his mother’s death, and then introduced him to Craig, played by the excellent actor Elliott Rosen. As Michael realised that his dad was flawed but essentially a decent man, the warring father and son reconciled emotionally.

  But this is EastEnders. Things are never that simple. Eddie was soon to learn the full horror of Michael’s plan, and realise that his malign son would have been willing to let Tyler die to gain revenge over his father. Thus enlightened, Eddie resolves that there is only one outcome to this situation: he must destroy the son who strove to destroy him.

  My final episode of EastEnders contained some of the hardest and most demanding scenes I have ever had to film. Steve, Tony, Matt and I were fully caught up in the dark psychodrama that was unfolding. It was electric. Even Derek would surely have admitted that the scene where the other Moons disowned the broken, sobbing Michael would not have been out of place on the stage of the National Theatre or Shakespeare’s Globe.

  We were all in tears. When Eddie uttered the fateful words to Michael, ‘Don’t call me dad – because you’re not my son anymore!’, my problem wasn’t making myself cry, as the script required; it was trying to stop.

  The scriptwriters did at least manage to magic some kind of happy ending out of this human horror show as my final scene saw Eddie collect Craig from his carers and leave with his no-longer-secret son to begin a new life in Spain. With a farewell wave, Eddie Moon drove out of Walford never to return – or will he?

  It’s a very good question. If I had to answer it now, as I write, I would say ‘No’. EastEnders was a fantastic adventure for me and I feel privileged to have had it. The public reaction to me was very warm, for which I am grateful, and the producers seem keen for me to go back. So why am I reluctant?

  I guess there are two reasons. Firstly, after the seismic events that exploded around Eddie before he left, I don’t see where the character would go next. I love how Eddie appeared in the show, grabbed it by the neck, shook it and vanished off into the sunset. How do you follow that?

  Secondly, and just as importantly, I don’t want to get typecast and become synonymous with one character. I did five months on the biggest TV show in Britain, it was brilliant, and at the end of it I am still David Essex – just about – in a lot of people’s eyes. Even now, though, as I walk down the street, I still get the odd person saying, ‘Hello, Eddie – I thought you were in Spain!’

  Indeed, I have had some very funny encounters lately. Just before Christmas 2011, I was back in my old stamping ground of the East End, in Mile End. I had just got out of my car when a young kid aged about thirteen on a mountain bike rode past me. He half-clocked me, did a cartoon double-take, and swerved back for another look.

  ‘’Ere, aren’t you Eddie Moon?’ he inquired.

  ‘I am, yes,’ I assured him.

  ‘Ah, Eddie Moon, man!’ he exploded with delight. ‘You’re wicked! I think you’re the best actor. You know what you should be doing, don’t you?’

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘You should be doing films with that Robert De Niro, yeah? Because you’re f****** great, man!’

  I thanked him kindly, returned his broad beam and we shared a little chitchat as he attempted to pump me for information on my character’s intentions and future plans.

  ‘When are you going back, man? I ain’t seen you in it for a while. When you going back?’

  I lowered my voice and told him conspiratorially that I’m not sure and I’m not allowed to say anyway and he nodded, satisfied with my answer, and held up his hand for a high-five.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Eddie!’ he yelled over his shoulder as he pedalled off. ‘Safe!’

  I love meetings like that and it’s great to be appreciated but I guess if I went back to EastEnders, I would fully turn into Eddie Moon. There are worse things to be – but I don’t think it’s me.

  So after Eddie exited stage left and the dust settled, Susan and I returned to the road late in 2011 with All the Fun of the Fair. With Nikolai Foster back in the director’s chair, we have re-proved the old showbiz adage that a musical is not written, it is re-written by improving the script and honing the story until I think what we have now is close to a definitive version.

  Late last year we did a week at the Theatre Royal in Bath. I caught a nasty viral infection and for the first time in my career – after almost fifty years – I had to admit defeat and miss a gig. As the tannoy announced that my very capable understudy, David Burrows, would play Levi Lee, some of the audience groaned and booed.

  My mind went back forty-two years to the London Palladium and an identical audience reaction to the news that Tommy Steele was unwell and they would be forced to watch a young unknown named David Essex as Dick Whittington. I felt for poor David but he rose to the occasion, just as I had done in 1969. It is what we actors do.

  In Bath I sat in the audience and watched All the Fun of the Fair unfold, for once not part of the proceedings, and I was proud of it. This was my idea, I told myself quietly, I made it happen, and now people enjoy it up and down the land. Even though I felt horribly ill, I relished the moment.

  That is rare for me. Throughout a career that’s had many highs – and some lows as well – I have never properly appreciated my successes. Even when I have had record-breaking stage shows, or box-office hit films, or been number one on the pop chart, I’ve always been focused on the next thing and impatient to move on to a new project. I’ve always tried to live tomorrow today.

  Well, I don’t have so many tomorrows left now, so it might be time for a change of attitude. It might be time to take more pleasure in my success and in the moment. I have got a very charmed life right now and a lot to appreciate.

  My four children are all doing great and doing what they want to in this world. Verity is a wonderful mum to eight-year-old Josef and two-year-old Daisy and works with my son Danny’s wife as my two new personal assistants.

  Danny is a music producer, his business partner Dave Need-ham is a member of my live band, and they produce both my albums and those of other artists. Kit is in the States, writing songs and doing some recordings.

  Bill is a gifted actor and has just completed his first feature film, Gajengi Boy: it’s a gypsy phrase for ‘half-breed’. I have a small cameo role in the movie and am writing the score, and while I was on the set, the director of photography, Mikolaj Jaroszewicz, a man with an Oscar nomination to his name, told me that Billy has an amazing presence and may be the future of British film. That was a proud moment.

/>   Between them, my kids have given me four brilliant grandkids in Josef, Daisy, George and David, and spending time with them is the most natural and precious pleasure in the world. And I am lucky that in my lovely wife, Susan, I have somebody bighearted and wonderful enough to enjoy them as much as I do.

  None of this means I am going to start taking things easy. As I write, I am considering offers to turn All the Fun of the Fair into a film. I’m writing Che, a musical based around the life of Che Guevara. I’ve dreamt up a one-person play called Tramp about a man who has lived hard and well. I’ve started writing poetry (yes, really!) and I still can’t imagine a time when I’m not making records and touring.

  So, who knows what twists and turns lie ahead? Maybe I will return to EastEnders at some point after all. As the old saying goes: never say never. But for now, I think I am probably Over the Moon.

  INDEX

  The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

  100 Club 37, 75

  A&M 226

  Abba 288

  Ace 246

  Ackland, Joss 177, 178

  Adams, Tony 93

  Adelphi, Liverpool 151

  Advision Studios 119–20, 168, 172

  Afrigo Band 246

  Agra 233

  Air Studios 210

  Alfie, Uncle 40

  Alhambra Theatre, Bradford 262

  Allison, Mose 33

  America (group) 262

  Amin, Idi 244

  Anderson, Jimmy 32, 34, 38

  Apted, Michael 136, 139–40

  Argentina 196–7

  Arnold, Martin and Morrow 84

  Arnott, Eric 259

  Arts Club Theatre 60–1, 274

  Askey, Arthur 95

  Aspel, Michael 271, 272

  Australia 163, 208–9

  Avondale Court 10, 17, 19–21, 34, 272