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Leslie Grantham from Eastenders

Leslie Grantham, who played Dirty Den in Eastenders, appears live on a special Foxy Radio show on Thursday September 11th. You can listen here.

Arguably Britiain’s biggest soap star and certainly the most controversial…when Foxy caught up with Leslie Grantham we found there’s even more to like about this loveable rogue than Dirty Den would have us remember.

So what have you been up to recently?

Well, I’m waiting to start a play called Murder with Love, which will take me up until Christmas. Then I’m doing panto, playing Captain Hook in Peter Pan. And i’m back on the road after that, so I’m quite busy. And I’ve been trying to get a bit or sun these last few weeks, but the clouds don’t want to let me.

Did you make a deliberate decision to go into theatre or has it just gone that way?

I don’t really think tele is that wonderful at the moment. A lot of the stuff that I’m seeing makes me feel like I’ve been there, done it and worn the t-shirt. I’m not sure it would stretch me, where as at least with theatre I’m being stretched.

Do you think you’ll ever shake off the legacy of Dirty Den? Or is it not something you want to shake off.

I think it’s a compliment really, if people remember you for something even after all these years. I guess it shows how lucky I was to be in a show that was well written. I could have played someone else and have been nothing. And it’s funny that wherever I go there are people saying, ‘Ooh Mr Grantham, Den, Des, Les, Len, Dirty’ or whatever.

He seemed like a pretty fun character to play. What were your favourite things about him?

That he could be totally un-pc. And that’s what people wanted him to be. People always say you must have had so much grief from the public. It did happen once, this woman came up to me and said, ‘Oh I hated you, you bastard’ but then said ‘but you made me laugh’. That was the thing about the guy, he could be trying to cut your legs off one minute and then make you laugh the next. And he had so many fantastic storylines. I mean obviously the Michelle story was superb, And there was the time when Ange found him on the phone to his girlfriend, threw a glass of whisky at him and he just looked at her and said, ‘Careful that could have hit me’. It was those one-liners that people loved. I mean I don’t know how many times I’ve been asked to say, ‘Hello princess’. It’s crazy.

Was there anything you didn’t like about playing him?

I think they made him too cosy the second time around. There were all these big promises about him strolling around the square like the guy from the Magnificent Seven. Then suddenly he became cosy and that’s the last thing people wanted Den to be.

Do you have a favourite period from your time on Eastenders?

It took me about 18 months to realise what was going on. I had to pinch myself and wake up to the fact that it was such a fantastic gig. Not that I had much time to reflect, because with my past I was under siege the whole time. There were more stories about me than Aesop’s Fables.

You mean the stories about your murder conviction that came out when Eastenders launched?

Yeh, but at the same time it was silly of me to be naive enough to think that it would just be swept under the carpet.

Were you not expecting it to turn into such enormous news?

Not at all. But in the end you get through it because of mates and family, the ones who aren’t selling stories. And the people at the BBC were very loyal, and the audience of course. There were a couple of papers saying, ‘Sack him’. But apparently the switchboards were jammed with callers saying things like, ‘He’s the best thing in it’. So I had the audience on my side.

It seems like a big leap, to have been in prison one minute and be Britain’s biggest soap star the next. Is reinventing yourself something that comes easily?

We all have to do it. You’ve got to keep reinventing yourself because there’s always someone coming along behind you. Even when I was in prison I had to reinvent myself because if you become stereotyped or stuck in your ways people take advantage of you.

You’ve talked about feeling disappointed with yourself in previous interviews. How do you get through that?

We all have a self-destruct button and unfortunately I have one that is, well, quite volatile. You get bollocks moments, but then there’s a reason why you’re still here. And then you look at your family and realise that you are not really hurting yourself, you’re hurting them.

Did your Internet sex scandal have a big impact on your family life?

It did at the time. But the point is that it was my own stupidity because I believed I was having a relationship with someone I wasn’t. It was set up by the paper who hacked into my computer and I should have realised. But in the end, something like that rocks the boat and makes you look stupid and that’s when you realise you have to grow up sometime.

So apart from Foxy Bingo bringing it up, do you think you will be able to leave it behind?

We all have to move on, but I can’t get rid of what I’ve done.

What about the public – have they responded differently to you?

The response from the public is huge and has always been positive. If I’m down the street, in the supermarket, in the wine shop or walking around the park, it’s always, ‘How’s it going mate? When are you going back on tele?’ ‘What are you up to? Can I shake your hand?’ Now I’m sounding like I’m Mother Teresa. I mean obviously there are people out there who don’t like me, but I haven’t come across them.

You were also a bit of a sex symbol back in Eastenders’ heyday.

Excuse me I still am!

Do you find that kind of attention difficult to manage?

I don’t understand it at all. I’m just a tall, skinny, ugly guy. No wonder Vision Express is making a fortune; there are all these people out there who need glasses. But really, it’s only the power of television. It can’t be anything else. If I hadn’t been on television and was just walking down the street I’d probably never be given a second look.

Which was your favourite Eastenders’ storyline?

Obviously the Michelle one. And Den getting killed. And when Wilmot Brown had raped Cathy and it was up Den to sort out getting revenge. I thought that whole story was handled brilliantly. But that was the thing about Eastenders in the early days. It was a docu-drama for the day. We touched on the subjects that no one else would have dreamed of approaching before the watershed - teenage prostitution, drugs.

They tried to get you to go back a few times after you left the show. What made you decide to go back in the end?

I only went back to kill off the character. The idea was to put the monster to bed. Den was somehow even bigger than Eastenders. And I went back because I thought ‘this is a show I care about and owe a lot to’. Obviously it had changed enormously since I was there before, the hours, the work ethic, the scripts. It had become like a sausage factory really.

Do you regret going back?

No I don’t regret going back because I made some great mates and rekindled relationships with people I hadn’t seen for years.

Who do you keep in touch with?

Wendy, Mo, Nigel, Letitia, the old producer and couple of directors. Funnily enough though, going around the country, the amount of supporting actors, people from the square, who come and see you in plays and say hi, it’s really nice. I shows that someone cares about you and that I treated them with due respect. I mean they are as worthy of all the episodes as the main actors.

It must be like having a second family.

Yeh, but the trouble is that you get in there and you think I’m never going to get out. I’d be there at 7.30 in the morning, leave at 7.30 at night and be given scenes with 36 pages of dialogue to learn overnight. I’d be up till 2am and have three or four weeks with hardly any sleep. I mean it’s not as hard as putting 15,000 bricks down in the middle of a road, or building a wall but it’s quite mentally and physically tiring.

What about ambitions for the future? Anything that you still want to fulfil?

I am trying to write this film script about an incident that happened in the war in Norfolk, so I’ll be glad to get on the road and fill my days writing that. And I’d like to play a cowboy one day.

You famously campaign for Down syndrome charities because you’re son has Down syndrome. How does that affect your life?

I have a fantastic wife and Danny’s brothers are terrific with him. He’s great. He’s funny and intelligent. He plays rugby, football, rides a horse and he’s got a better social calendar than Camilla Parker-Bowles. And that’s all down to the love that he gets from his mother and his brothers. it doesn’t matter how much money you have or haven’t got, you have to work non-stop to get everything a child like Danny needs, speech therapy, occupational therapy etc. And my wife does just that, works non-stop.

The trouble is that someone…and I don’t want this to sound like I’m being snobby or patronising, but if some poor woman who lives in a council flat and is on hardly any money doesn’t know how to access the support that is out there, they get nothing. Danny is always going to need something, whether it’s speech therapy or whatever, but he’s not as needy as most. He has a mother, brother and friends who really make sure that he succeeds. It’s kids less fortunate that I worry about.