A bright summer afternoon casts shadows in the narrow hallways of the neat Edwardian terraced houses on Ilford Road in Newcastle. Beams of light pierce the musty blackness and floating dust is illuminated as if shards of atoms vibrating in mid-air.
Leslie Grantham emerges from the dingy light, bare floorboards creaking under his feet. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he looks a lot taller than he does on television.
Appearing to stare through me, he stretches out a hand and says, with a barely noticeable smirk: “So, you’re the journalist who wants to interview me, eh?”
That same subtle slyness, at first it’s impossible to tell if this is the notorious ‘Dirty Den’ or the actor who simply played the part.
Grantham is temporarily lodging while his theatre tour of Dad’s Army: Marches On visits Newcastle and has been upstairs relaxing in his attic bedroom ahead of the final evening performance.
“Newcastle is a great city”, he says finally. “It is a fantastic, vibrant city. But you don’t want to go out on your own too late at night because you just get knocked over by the swell of people having a good time.”
It must be odd to be Leslie Grantham. As acting careers go, those which start in prison drama groups don’t usually end with a name in lights, but then Leslie Grantham doesn’t really do ‘usually’.
As he sits solemnly in his crisp stone-washed jeans and blue polo shirt he comes across as a man who has not only been there and done that, but he’s worn the T-shirt for so long it wore out and ended up being cut up to make dusters.
Playing ‘Dirty’ Den Watts in Eastenders made Grantham perhaps the most watched soap star in Britain. Some 30million people watched the 1986 Christmas special where he served his on-screen wife divorce papers, and when he returned to the show in 2003 following a 15 year absence 17million tuned in.
Typically though, he is non-plussed about this. “Sometimes being a celebrity can be a bit of a pain in the arse, but if I’ve brought a bit of pleasure into someone’s life then hey, great.”
“If people want to call me ‘Dirty Den’, or ‘Watts’ or whatever, then it’s fine”, he says. Then he adds, perhaps aware of the preconceptions people who know his history have of him, “At least I’ve done something positive people will remember me for.”
Amidst his deadpan charm, it’s easy to forget that this man is a murderer. In 1966 Grantham was a 19-year-old soldier in Osnabrück, Germany, and during a botched robbery his gun went off and killed a taxi driver. Sentenced to life, he spent a decade in English prisons after a dishonorable discharge from the army.
It would be fair to say that the former star of Eastenders has had it pretty good considering, and he’s the first to admit it.
“I was just very lucky,” he says. “I don’t get big headed or anything, I just sort of think I am lucky. And as long as they pay my wages its fine.”
These days he almost seems to just play ‘Leslie Grantham’ and there is a noticeable element of his personality mirrored in the roles he gets, probably stemming from his most famous casting.
Grantham is a hugely popular panto villain and he positively revels in it. It’s as if he were born to be the panto bad guy. He has played a crook in The Bill and recently had a cameo role as a decidedly dodgy geezer in the slasher film Deadtime, due for release in 2011. Even his part in Dad’s Army is as Private Walker, the wheeler-dealer Cockney.
“I wouldn’t say I’m typecast, I have done other things,” he argues. “But you get to my age and you just want to have fun and play fun parts. Playing bad boys are the fun parts, trust me.”
Make no mistake, Grantham knows how lucky a boy he’s been. From getting his big break on Dr Who in 1984, to recovering from that cringe-worthy moment involving a webcam in an Eastenders’ dressing room.
“I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve been out of drama school for 25 years and I’ve always had work, but it could finish in September and then I’d be out of work and down the dole queue.”
For those that are unaware, Grantham left Eastenders under a cloud after being caught on a webcam in a very compromising situation.
While he maintains that he was set up in a tabloid sting, one cannot help but feel that the “stupid thing” that “everybody does” would have been far more painful if Jane, his wife of almost 30 years and mother to his three children, had been less forgiving.
“It was a set-up,” he exclaims. “I shouldn’t have gone down that road, but we all do something stupid.”
Typically resilient, Grantham has put that shameful incident behind him and remains defiant in its wake. He is now planning to make a TV drama out of his experience, aiming to highlight the behavior of the tabloids he detests.
“I’m working on a script about it,” he says.
“Because I’m touring I haven’t sat down and written too much, but I’ve got it all there. It won’t be a personal one, it won’t be about me, but there have been several guys who have been caught up in tabloid stings over the years and I want to explore the culture and consequences of that.”
In this light, he is scathing of the way British culture, epitomized by television, has headed of late.
“It’s going to be a drama, but drama and comedy shouldn’t be separate. You watch American drama and it has comedy in it, but you watch British comedy and it doesn’t have any comedy in it.”
“British TV is just not very good at the moment. It’s full of reality television and is celebrity led. It is style over content rather than content over style, and the only one who loses out is the audience” he says.
“They’re being told what to watch and because they watch it all the time they think ‘oh yeah, that’s what I want to watch’.”
This is a problem he sees in his old haunt, Albert Square. “It was great in those days, we were doing brilliant scripts written by two brilliant people and we were only doing two episodes a week.”
“Now they’re doing four episodes a week I think the audience get cheated because it becomes dilutes and there’s nothing for them to rush home for because every story line comes around every four or five weeks.”
Sometimes Grantham is so dry you feel you can actually see him crinkling and cracking as water evaporates from his pores. It’s a wicked sense of humor that masquerades as cynicism.
“My dad used to have a saying: ‘if you offer a starving man dog poo often enough, eventually he’ll eat it’.”
For this reason, he promises he won’t be coming to a reality television screen near you any time soon.
“I keep turning down the jungle, I just couldn’t do it. Or Big Brother. I couldn’t be doing it. I’d be the only person I’d know wouldn’t I?”
His take-it-as-it-comes attitude is refreshing in the age of bargain-bin celebrity. “I’ve been offered it every year since the first one. I keep saying no, and they keep offering me more money, an extraordinary amount of money, but I just couldn’t do it.”
Then, in that sardonic tone again, he says: “I’d probably end up throwing half of ‘em, including Ant and Dec, in with the crocodiles. That would make good television though wouldn’t it? ‘Come Dine With Me on Ant and Dec’.”
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