Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
DARK SECRETS BEHIND THE LAUGHS
They’re some of our most beloved shows, but the stars of these three brilliant sitcoms have opened up to us about their own personal heartaches over the years
The runaway TV comedy hit when Weekend launched was Men Behaving Badly, which ran for seven series from 1992 and won the first National Television Award for Best Comedy in 1995. It followed the antics of beerguzzling flatmates Gary and Tony and their hilariously inept attempts at chivalry as they tried to woo their respective desires Dorothy and Deborah, but off screen the four main players suffered their own individual heartaches.
Neil Morrissey appeared as loveable rogue Tony, but found himself public enemy number one when he had a five-week affair with a young Amanda Holden, who was married to Les Dennis at the time. He’s appeared in some of TV’s biggest hits since, including The Night Manager, Line Of Duty and Unforgotten.
Leslie Ash, who played Deborah, arguably had it worse than Neil. She was viciously mocked when a procedure to plump up her lips went wrong, causing them to swell up grotesquely and earning her the nickname ‘Trout Pout’. Then she spent months in hospital after contracting the MRSA superbug and was left using a walking stick.
Martin Clunes, who played loutish Gary, has become one of TV’s bestknown character actors and carved out a successful sideline fronting travel and wildlife shows, but he’d been carrying a painful family secret around since his teens. And Caroline Quentin, who was Gary’s long-suffering girlfriend Dorothy, was married to Paul Merton for six years while Men Behaving Badly was being made, but they divorced in 1998. A year later she became pregnant by Sam Farmer, 12 years her junior, who was a runner on the show. They married in 2006.
In 2003 the four actors were all signed up to reunite for a new series of the show five years after it ended, but Caroline Quentin pulled out at the last minute without explanation. Here’s what they’ve told us over the years...
NEIL MORRISSEY
‘ I suppose I’ve been seen as nice for too long,’ he lamented in an interview with us in August 2000, three months after the affair with Amanda Holden came to light. ‘ It was my turn to come under the cosh. But I’m a bachelor, I’m not married. Why was it all my responsibility? The worst thing was being hounded. It made me feel like a criminal.’
It was reported that Les Dennis had said he was glad that Morrissey had become a public hate figure, but Neil said, ‘He might have been misreported, but I’m sure if Les wanted
to say anything to me he would have phoned me, though he never did. But it isn’t just to do with me, it’s too complex. It’s not my place to go into what was going on with Les and Amanda.’
LESLIE ASH
‘As my mother grew older her lips almost disappeared into her mouth, and I didn’t want to end up looking like that,’ she told Lynda LeePotter in November 2003. ‘I’d had the lip procedure done before and I was really pleased, so I decided to do it again. But this time the doctor gave me two extra injections, one under each nostril, and my body couldn’t break the silicone down. I’ve worked so hard and to be suddenly known for having injections in your lips is very upsetting. I thought, “What have I done?” I’d let everyone down. I felt absolutely stupid that I could have destroyed myself like that. It took a while before I could talk about it. All the stuff in the papers hurt badly.’
In 2004 she caught a strain of the superbug MRSA after she ended up in hospital when a sex session with her husband went wrong. The bug attacked her spine and left her permanently disabled. ‘Sometimes I wonder what I could have done that’s so bad for this to happen to me,’ she told us in October 2009. ‘We were having sex and it was a horrible accident. I fell off the bed and when I tried to get up, I found it difficult to breathe. My lung had torn and it was filling up with fluid. The pain was unbelievable.
‘I’m still on painkillers and will be for the rest of my life. Every day I think, “Maybe I’m back to normal,” but I know I’m not. It’s taken me five years to get to this stage. I’ve lived through being hoisted in and out of bed and not being able to sit up, being in terrible pain, being in wheelchairs, on crutches or with a stick. I had the rug pulled from under me and my whole world was flipped up in the air. The one big thing in my life was my career. I’ve worked since I was 15. If there was any chance of getting that back in any way, shape or form, I wanted to do it. There will be things I won’t ever be able to do
– jump, run, dance. The one thing I can still do is act.’
MARTIN CLUNES
‘When I was about 18 I found out my father wasn’t living at home when he died,’ he revealed to us in September 1998. ‘He’d left us. At the time I didn’t know. Mum kept it from us. He was an actor, away lots, working in the evening, so there was always a degree of absenteeism there. But he’d gone to Majorca. Cancer was diagnosed not long after, and soon after that he was dead. I did talk about it with Mum once. She said, “I always thought he left me”, meaning that it was in some way her fault. I said, “Actually, he left us all”, and that is what sucks to me.’
Some years later his mother died, and Martin told how he almost missed her last breath. ‘We’re all so familiar with the armoury of hospitals these days, aren’t we? All the machines, the lights. I’d been sitting in intensive care looking at Mum’s lights, comparing them to everyone else’s lights, and it all looked pretty favourable, in my expert opinion. I thought that even though the doctor had said things were grave, she was going to be OK. I gave her a kiss and said, “Now, I will see you tomorrow,” and she said, “Well, I look forward to that.”
‘I phoned my sister who was in the US on holiday, and said, “Look, she’s really ill, but she’s all right. You mustn’t come home.” When I hung up there was a message from the ward saying, “Come quickly”. So I rushed back and they were working frantically on her. I think they were just keeping her alive until I got there. I’m so glad they did. I held her hand, and that means something to me. I would have hated for her to be alone, to have felt abandoned. She probably wasn’t even aware I was there, but still.’
CAROLINE QUENTIN
‘The age gap between me and Sam was never an issue for us,’ she told Weekend in January 2015. ‘ It always seemed strange that other people even commented on it. We’ve been together almost 17 years now so we must be doing something right. But we work at it, a happy marriage is about luck and timing. I met Sam when I’d already been married once, so you learn from the mistakes you’ve made. You see couples looking at each other across the table thinking, “What the hell am I doing with him?” but thank God we don’t. You have to pay attention. If there are problems, flag them up early on and get on with it.’