I WAS A BIT BRAIN DEAD FOR 13 YEARS

Last time they met, Leslie Ash was still suffering from THAT botched lip job and could barely walk after contracting a superbug for which she received a record £5 million compensation. Now, she tells Rebecca Hardy, she finally feels alive again after ditching the drugs that were messing her up

Leslie Ash hasn’t seen her old pals from her Men Behaving Badly days for goodness knows how long. A month before lockdown she reached her 60th birthday, so she asked, she says, ‘everyone I’ve ever known whether they wanted to come to my party’ at the @Bar & Bites in Clapham, south London, the bar that she runs with her husband, ex-footballer Lee Chapman. Not one of her co-stars from the hugely popular 90s BBC sitcom – Caroline Quentin, Neil Morrissey and Martin Clunes – came.

Twenty-five years ago when Men Behaving Badly was the must-watch programme of the week, these much younger actors were as thick as thieves, particularly Leslie and Caroline. So much so that when Leslie had an argument with Lee – and there were many alcohol-fuelled rows in this volatile relationship – she’d storm off and beg herself a bed at Caroline’s flat.

‘We were really, really close but it’s a bit like going to school,’ says Leslie. ‘You can be close to people for a long time, then your life just moves on. You might move out of London, as Caroline did, you have kids, you go into another production and you become friends with people in that production. We all went our separate ways.’

Caroline, now 60 too, married Men Behaving Badly set runner Sam Farmer, moved to Devon, had two children and went on to become one of our most bankable TV stars in shows like Life Of Riley, Jonathan Creek, Life Begins and Blue Murder. This year she’s been appearing on BBC1’S Strictly Come Dancing.

Similarly Martin Clunes, now 58, hotfooted it to Dorset where he lives with his TV producer wife Philippa and their daughter, Emily, and stars as the taciturn Martin Ellingham in hugely successful ITV drama series Doc Martin.

Neil Morrissey, also 58, divorced his wife Amanda with whom he has a 31-year-old son, famously had a short-lived affair with another Amanda (Britain’s Got Talent’s Amanda Holden), eventually settled down in a long-term relationship with Emma, a lawyer, in north London and has landed roles in some huge TV hits such as Line Of Duty and The Night Manager.

And Leslie? Her career ‘stopped dead’ (her words) in 2004 after she contracted a variant of the superbug MRSA while having an epidural injection at London’s Chelsea and Westminster Hospital – the bug attacked her spine and left her so terribly injured that specialists warned she’d be in a wheelchair by the age of 60. She received a whopping £5 million in compensation, but would gladly hand back every penny to be able to waltz around the Strictly dance floor like her one-time chum Caroline.

‘Lee is one of the only people who really understands what it was actually like,’ says Leslie, who’s been married for 32 years and has two grown-up sons, Joe and Max. ‘I was quite heavily medicated for 13 years with all sorts of things – painkillers, antidepressants. I was sort of a bit brain dead. You don’t get too happy and you don’t get too sad. You sit in the middle.

‘A few years ago Max told me I was slurring my words. He was right. I thought, “God that’s got to stop.” I went to my GP to get help weaning myself off the drugs. I thought my spine would hurt and I’d suddenly be in all this pain. But the pain was no more and no less. I thought, “Jesus, this happened when I was 44, now I’m nearly 60. What a waste of time.” I’ve definitely lost about 13 years of my life by being on painkillers.

‘I suppose you always think, “Did it happen for a reason? Was I just too happy?”’ She snorts. Shakes her head. ‘But you can’t do that for too long or you’d drive yourself mad. You’ve got to move on – got to move on.’ She repeats the words and you sense she tells herself this often. ‘I couldn’t just sit on the couch watching daytime TV. I had to do something.’

Indeed. When I last interviewed Leslie five years after she contracted the bug she leaned heavily upon a silver-topped stick and spoke with the sort of slur you’d normally put down to having had a few too many vodka shots. She told me then about the ‘tipsy’ sex with Lee that ended in the ‘horrible, horrible accident’ when she fell off the bed, punctured a lung and broke two ribs, and ended up at London’s Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. It was during her treatment there that she contracted the bug, and she vowed then to give up the booze and get a hold of her life.

She addressed the drinking but remained an emotional mess. ‘The last time I spoke to you I think I was very heavily sedated,’ she says now. ‘I found it difficult to string two words together and sometimes when I started a conversation I forgot what I was talking about.’

Today, Leslie’s blonde bob has grown, falling below her shoulders, and when she needs to fetch something she darts across the room without a stick. She actually looks remarkable – better, in fact, than she has in decades. Remember her ‘trout pout’ when, in her early 40s, she decided to ‘plump’ up her upper lip but the procedure went horribly wrong? Her lips remained abnormally swollen for years, leading to ridicule. Now she practises facial exercises every day to tone up her face – and walks, she says, ‘better than I have ever done before, more upright.

‘I have to keep my muscles really strong because if you don’t use muscle you lose it. If you lose your muscle you lose your strength, and if I lose my strength I won’t be able to walk, so I have to keep this machine [she gestures to her body] going all the time. I have to keep my core strong so I do a lot of Pilates.

‘In 2004 when all of this happened I was 44, so 60 seemed quite a long way away. The doctors told me that I’d probably be in a wheelchair by the time I was 60, so that was in my head and I was terrified. I thought my whole life was going to come to an abrupt end because I’d end up being extremely disabled.

‘My mum died at the age of 68, of a heart attack in her sleep, but she’d had breast cancer and a mastectomy. She wasn’t the fittest person.

‘I found it hard to string two words together’

‘Did it happen because I was just too happy?’