Martin Kemp claims 'EastEnders' bosses killed his character off after he told them he had landed a contract with ITV.
Martin Kemp claims EastEnders bosses killed his character off after he told them he had landed a contract with ITV
The 61-year-old singer and actor played Steve Owen on the BBC One soap from 1998 to 2002, before going on to star in ITV drama 'Serious and Organised', and the star says he was told at one point that the door would be left open on a potential return to the show, but when he opened his final scripts he realised his character was being blown up.
He said: "I’ll tell you what happened was, I went in one day and I said, 'I’m leaving, my time is done, I’ve done everything I can do.' So, I went upstairs, spoke to the boss, I said, ‘I’ve got to go. My time’s up,’ I knew it was ... it’s the sort of show you realise your time is up when you’re going round doing the same story but in a different suit.
"So, you’ve said those lines before, and I thought, my time’s up, I’ve got to go. So, I went upstairs, and I told them, and the producer said to me, ‘Listen, you’ve been a big character, you can come back on to the show any time, we’ll never kill you off, we want your character to be alive in case we want you to come back.'
"So anyway, I walk out, and I go back in a few weeks later, they called me upstairs, they said, ‘Martin, what are you going to do when you leave 'EastEnders', where are you going next?’ I said, ‘Well actually, I got a contract with ITV.’ So, I go back in a month later - killed me off. I opened the script, and I look at it: ‘Steve Owen gets blown up.’ "
Before joining the soap, Martin had two brain tumours removed, and he credits the show with helping him to "recover" from that tough time.
He told Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett's weekly podcast 'Dish': "When 'EastEnders' was offered to me, it was like, everybody around me was saying, 'Don’t do it, don’t do it. It’s going to ruin your career, don’t do it.' Well because they hadn’t had any name actors in that show before, right
"Everybody had grown up with 'EastEnders', so I was kind of the first one of those name actors to go in. But when it was offered to me, it was only really about five years after I had gone through the whole brain tumour business, that I went through in the 90s, about '95, and so for me, I was struggling to get myself together, you know, and my brain wasn’t working properly still from the operation, you know.
"To the point where sometimes if I wanted to walk left, I would walk right, or like I couldn’t think about putting things in order, or anything like that. Learning lines was just way out there.
"When 'EastEnders' was offered to me it was a chance for me to get over it, so it wasn’t just me taking 'EastEnders' on because I thought it was a good gig – it was me trying to get my life back together.
"I honestly didn’t even know if I could remember the lines because my brain was so messed up from it, you know. So, when I look back at 'EastEnders', it’s more than just, yeah, it was a good job. It was the thing that helped me recover, more than anything else. Yeah, it moved me forward and left that whole nightmare behind."
'Dish', hosted by Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett, is available on all podcast providers now.
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