I got high in drug den and farted on by Taliban – but nothing compares to my fight with Barbara Windsor, says Ross Kemp
FROM Albert Square to Afghanistan, Ross Kemp has seen it all.
The Bafta-winning star, who made his name playing hardman Grant Mitchell on BBC soap EastEnders, went on to a documentary-making career that saw him face some of the most dangerous places – and people – on the planet.
Now he has gathered some of the strangest tales from what he calls his “unexpected life” in new book, Take Nothing For Granted.
It spans from his Essex childhood and early days in acting, to an adventurous career that has taken him all around the world.
Here, Emily Fairbairn provides exclusive extracts as Ross, 59, shares some of the favourite things he has learned.
- Take Nothing For Granted: Tales From An Unexpected Life by Ross Kemp, published by Seven Dials on September 28, priced £20 in hardback. Also available in eBook and audio.
There’s no better mate than Babs
THE term national treasure gets used a lot, but Dame Barbara Windsor truly was.
I was lucky to know her for over 25 years, having played her on-screen son on EastEnders.
She told me you should never start a fight you weren’t prepared to finish.
So when she got into a disagreement with a woman in a nightclub, she picked up a bar stool to make good on the advice.
The problem was she was less than 5ft tall and top heavy.
So when the bar stool reached a certain height, she fell slowly backwards on her very high heels.
During my EastEnders years she was my confidante and we trusted each other.
The first time we shot a scene together I’d found her retching with nerves into a plant pot. I couldn’t imagine the pressure.
There was a scene in 1998 where Grant had to hit Peggy.
I pleaded with the producers to cut it but we worked out a way that I’d give her the gentlest of taps, then the script said something like “Peggy stumbles backwards”.
It came to action, and I “slapped” her gently as agreed.
She went back, like she’d been hit by Mike Tyson, Henry Cooper and Muhammad Ali all at once, near on somersaulting backwards like a stunt professional.
Everyone rushed to check she was OK and as they helped her to her feet, she looked at me, winked and said, “Ooh that was fantastic.”
I got bin liners of hate mail from that point onwards.
Avoid being farted on by the Taliban
I REALLY do not recommend being farted on by the Taliban.
I was filming in Afghanistan in 2009, and this particular night, we arrived at a compound that seemed like a decent spot for a night’s kip.
The only problem was this compound wasn’t deserted like most of them are. The locals had refused to leave.
We had to proceed as if everyone we met in the compound was the Taliban, or working with them.
So we all troop in, set up for the night and then try and find a spot where we can get our heads down.
Me and the forward operating officer see this odd structure, which looks like a kind of bed or table made from what looks like the bristles of a broom.
I assume it must be some sort of platform that they dry out poppies, or store things on.
But it looks like it will keep the light out. And that could be crucial for us to get to sleep.
So we crawl under, and close our eyes.
But about five minutes later, we hear the unmistakable sound as several bodies lay down on the bristles above us.
And that’s when we realise that we’re lying under their bed.
We can hear them talking to each other. I decide the best thing to do is let them fall asleep. And then we can leave quietly.
But then the first fart cracks off. It echoes around the compound.
One of them comments, and I can’t understand what they’re saying but the tone is one clearly full of admiration.
Then a different fart, with a different tone. Then a giggle.
Now the Afghan diet mainly features vegetables, rice, lentils and a lot of spices.
It becomes clear they are very aware that we are under there.
I’ll never truly know if they were Taliban but all I can tell you is some of those farts would be outlawed by the Geneva Convention.
Eventually we crawled out, gasping, and slept that night in a doorway with my head stuck to someone else’s boots.
Get some air in drug den
“ROSS, are you OK?” I nod, absent-mindedly, watching all the tiny birds flittering around us twittering.
That was when I realised I should probably have been going outside for air.
For the last six or so hours, I’d been interviewing members of one of South Africa’s most notorious street gangs.
I’d sat with them as they smoked “tick” (crystal meth), the enormously strong local cannabis called Durban poison and crushed-up (sedative) Mandrax.
It was a chemical rollercoaster.
The cameraman was taking regular breaks, to get some air.
But I was trying to win their trust, so I stayed.
I was having a fascinating conversation. Which now I realise is partly because of the huge amount of drug fumes I passively consumed.
I’ve seen a lot of drugs. I’ve trod coca leaves at the edge of the Amazon rainforest, making cocaine.
I’ve accidentally sniffed a home-made pipe with residue of a mixture of aluminium cleaner and insect killer called Man Down, while making a film in Belmarsh prison.
I’ve seen people off their face on uppers and downers and everything in between.
I don’t judge anyone. Though my drug of choice is a bottle of Pinot Noir.
Expect the unexpected, wherever you are
“MAKE sure to ask him about his toes,” says the journalist. “His toes?!”
“Just trust me.”
We were in Glasgow (one of my favourite cities), making a film about whether the welfare system was fit for purpose in the modern world.
We were in the filthy flat of Neil, a 46-year-old alcoholic who was limping badly.
I asked the obvious question. He told me he’d pulled his toes off. “Why did you do that?” I ask.
“The pain was so bad.” “What did you do with them?” And he replies in a very matter-of-fact way: “Well, two of them’s on top of the telly.”
And then he limps over and picks up two brown, wrinkled objects and holds them out to me. “That’s the big toe and the wee toe, I think,” he says.
“There’s another one lying around somewhere.”
Now they’re closer, I can clearly see bone sticking out of one end and a nail at the other.
He tells me that they’d lost circulation and were hurting so badly he’d got drunk one night and just wrenched them off.
There have been plenty of moments over the last 25 years where I’ve questioned what I’m doing, and holding another man’s mummified toes was definitely one of them.
There’s no point fibbing to your dad if he’s a copper
IT could be a right pain having a copper for a dad. There was no point in lying, he’d just look at you and he’d know.
It didn’t stop me and my brother trying, of course — about how the window got broken, or the daffodils trampled.
As a detective, Dad kept us shielded from a lot of what went on.
At one point he was in the Flying Squad, the unit set up by Scotland Yard to deal with armed robbers, the proper gangsters.
When I was little and about as tall as his kneecaps, I’d hug his legs when he got home, the feeling of the suit fabric against my face, the smell that was peculiar to him, a kind of faint chemical smell I didn’t much like.
After I’d left EastEnders I was playing a detective in a series called Without Motive.
We shot in the morgue at Kingston upon Thames.
As soon as I entered the morgue there was that smell that I hadn’t smelled for more than 30 years and it suddenly took me back to being a little boy again.
It was the smell of formaldehyde.
Dodge getting a dicky tummy in a warzone
DIARRHOEA and vomiting took more troops off the battlefields in Afghanistan than anything else.
And when I went to make a documentary in 2009, I got a taste of how bad it could be.
Whenever I went to the toilet, soldiers got their camera phones out.
I dread to think how many pictures there are of me squatting over a hole in the ground.
When I was there, I was as sick as I have ever been.
The only time I have ever felt anywhere near as rough was years later, when I was caught short in a remote village in Madagascar.
They’d never seen white people before and we had to pay a witch doctor to get around the bad luck of us being there.
Halfway through an interview my stomach went.
I knew I had to go. There were no toilets. And I was searching for the place people used for the toilet.
I had started and I couldn’t stop. All of a sudden, an old lady comes out of the undergrowth and stands watching me.
I tried to keep a neutral expression. Then an old bloke joins her. Another nod. Then some kids.
By the time I’m ready for my wet wipes, there are about 20 people stood around me.
When I finally pulled up my shorts, they broke into spontaneous applause.
Don’t question a good gig
WHEN I started out as an actor in my early 20s, I found a lucrative side career of being the English guy in Italian adverts.
First, I was cast in an advert for a cleaning product called Vim, which was filmed on an amazing yacht off the coast of Sardinia alongside a very beautiful Scandinavian crew.
The next was for Bacardi, which saw me and another guy out at a bar, drinking Bacardi, while beautiful Italian people listened to us, laughing with adoration.
I was feeling pretty smug. I was being paid to hang out in Milan with beautiful people.
I remember commenting to the director, it was strange that they seemed to cast all these British guys in Italian adverts, and he said: “We just can’t find any Italian guys who are ugly enough.
“We need to convince Italians even ugly people become attractive when they drink Bacardi.”
I nodded along and smiled but suddenly felt a lot less smug about my sex appeal.