Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
BEST SUPPORTING CO-STAR (Drama) BEST CASTING
Gearoid almost didn’t make it Gearoid, 21, on drugs & booze hell
New Corrie star Will Mellor’s spray hair. Yep, that’s not a typo: Will’s thatched a plan to spray paint over his thinning locks.
Well, we are living in hairy times (ahem!)
Talking of Prince Harry, or Haz as Meghan calls him .... he’s finally opened up on the big question we’ve all been asking.
Yep, Who does he want to play him in
The Crown?
Pal Damian Lewis, of course.
Although according to the “Official 2014 Poll of UK’S Sexiest Gingers” (yes, it’s a real thing!), that would actually be a downgrade in the hotness stakes.
MIRACLE A MAN has opened up about his battle with drug addiction which led to a decline in his mental health and left him in ICU.
Gearoid Marshall Mcgarry, from Ardoyne, North Belfast, was 13 when he started smoking cannabis and drinking but in search of a “bigger hit” he moved on to cocaine and MDMA.
Unaware of the negative effects this was having on his mental health, Gearoid then noticed he was feeling angry, sad and had a lack of motivation every day – he’d wake up, have a smoke and then go back to sleep. This was his routine for months.
The now 21-year-old ended up in intensive care after he took a cocktail of more than 100 prescription drugs.
Gearoid said his granda gave him mouth-to-mouth while waiting for an ambulance to arrive.
He added: “When I was 13 I started to smoke grass and drink a bit and as the years went on I started taking cocaine and MDMA. I was drinking a lot more then. I had a good childhood and a great family around me.
COCAINE
“I don’t know why I started, I just wanted to try it. Obviously I liked it so I would smoke it on a daily basis and then on the weekend I would have been drinking and taking more drugs. People around me were doing it and I felt like why not try it as well. I enjoyed it, that sounds stupid.
“The stronger drugs were a better hit than smoking grass, so I moved away from it and started on the cocaine. Maybe three times a day or so. This led to a lot more drinking too.
“I wouldn’t say that I was in a bad place, I was actually in a good place but obviously when you take something for so long your mental health starts to go and mine just dropped. I didn’t know the effect it was having on my mental health at the time.
“I was always angry and feeling depressed and sad. There were days I didn’t want to get out of bed. Some days I would get up, have a smoke and go back to bed. The same thing for months and months.
“When I was 16, I was seeing a psychiatrist and me and my daddy went to an appointment and I had written a letter to tell them my mental health was really bad and that I needed a bed ASAP.
“They said, ‘Gearoid, we can’t. There are only 10 beds’ and I said, ‘Well if you can’t help me now it is your own fault’ but really there
I have a second chance and it means the world to me GEAROID MARSHALL MCGARRY YESTERDAY
was nothing they could do. I couldn’t tell my family.
“A couple of days later I took an overdose and then my uncle and my granda came and kicked my mummy’s door in and found me in the kitchen.
“My granda had to give me mouthto-mouth until the ambulance arrived. I was actually dead and they brought me back to life again.” Gearoid was rushed to Intensive Care and was there for 13 days where doctors believed he may not have made it through the first night.
With family by his side, Gearoid’s mum took a photo of her baby boy in ICU, a photo that now makes him ask himself, ‘Why?’ He said: “Why did I do it? I could have been dead.
My whole family would have been broken. My wee brother growing up without me.
“My family and friends wouldn’t have known why and they would have been looking for answers.
“I look at my younger brother and do not want him to go down the path I did. If he ever had troubles, I’d be there for him.
“Throughout everything, my family have been incredible. Very supportive. I am very close to one of my aunts and she is amazing, like a second mummy to me. Any time I can’t speak to my mummy or daddy I go straight to her.
I have a second chance and it means the world to me.”
When lockdown lifts, Gearoid said with the help of his friend and youth worker Conor Loughlin, he wants to visit youth clubs and tell them his story.
He added: “I am raising money for two different homeless charities, Rosemount House and Reaching Out Support Group.
“I want to highlight the homeless problem there is, not only in Belfast. There are so many people sleeping rough and I know I wouldn’t last.
The lid on his beloved piano is propped open and a flickering candle lights his photos as the wife of rockney star Chas Hodges relives their very last conversation.
It’s been two and a half years since the Chas and Dave legend died unexpectedly aged 74, but those last moments by his hospital bed are still crystal clear to his devoted missus Joan.
She recalls: “The last night I kissed him, told him I loved him and said, ‘Right, I’ll see you in the morning.’ And I completely believed that.
“He said, ‘I love you, too.’ If ever anyone knew they were loved, that man did.
“Then he rested down. I had my arm thrown on him and I kept that there. We were holding hands.
“And, no, he died in the night.”
Now Joan, who was married to Chas for 52 years, is determined his memory and his music will live for ever.
An album has just been released featuring never-heard-before home recordings. And it is the piano he played at home that still stands open, inviting passers-by to play, just as he requested.
Chas always found it impossible to resist tickling a few ivories on the vintage Steinway Vertegrand.
Joan says: “He never, ever went past the piano without playing something. Just ding-ding-ding, then off he’d go.
“So now, every morning, I run my fingers along the keys, just to keep the piano alive. It should be heard because it always was when he was here.”
Chas was battling oesophagus cancer when he passed away from pneumonia in September 2018. His death was a huge shock to his loved ones because the cancer, diagnosed a year earlier, was deemed to be under control.
The star confronted the illness with typical Cockney joviality. He carried on playing his guitar during nine weeks of chemotherapy and five of radiotherapy to remove the tumour on his throat.
And he wrote one of his trademark ditties, Sling Your Hook – which he dedicated to the disease.
The medics who treated him were invited to his comeback gig in Hyde Park in the summer of 2018, just weeks after he had a 10in oesophageal stent fitted.
Chas and Joan were so optimistic about his recovery, they booked a holiday for the October of that year in Norfolk, where Chas hoped to enjoy one of his favourite pastimes, fishing.
But in September, he was back in hospital. Joan says: “I never, ever accepted that he was going to die. It was blasted pneumonia that got him.” Joan
was by her husband’s side throughout his cancer. The only time they kept a “hand’s distance” apart was after Chas had radiotherapy and doctors warned them his radioactive levels could “zap” Joan if she kissed him before midnight.
“He zaps me anyway when he kisses me, but that’s just love,” Joan told the Mirror at the time.
Now she is grateful she was able to be with Chas in his final days. She says: “I had a camp bed next to his, so we spent the last week just completely together.
“But I thought he was going to pull through and I’d take him home.”
Chas and Joan met in 1961, just before she became one of Britain’s first Playboy
Bunny girls. The actress went on to appear in TV’S Only Fools and Horses, The Bill and, more recently, It’s A Sin.
Chas had played bass for Jerry Lee Lewis and supported pal Sir Paul Mccartney with The Beatles.
But in the 1970s he teamed up with musician Dave Peacock, who he met while hitchhiking. Over the next five decades, they played Knebworth and Glastonbury and released hit after hit.
Joan hit it off with Dave’s wife, Sue. All four went down to Margate to promote the Chas and Dave smash about the seaside town.
“We were one big family,” says Joan. “I remember being outside our house once and this kid said, ‘Here, are you married to Chas and Dave?’ Sue used to get the same. She’d say, ‘Yes, we are married to both of them.’” After Sue died of lung cancer in 2009, Dave credited Chas, Joan and their three kids for helping him through.
Now Dave supports Joan as they mourn Chas. She reveals: “Dave says, ‘I’ll be sitting with a glass of wine and I’ll think of a song – and my immediate thought is to ring Chas.’
“As I said to him, Chas and I had a marriage of love, but Chas and Dave had a marriage of music.” Dave still finds it painful to listen to their vast back catalogue, which includes hits such as
Gertcha, Rabbit and There Ain’t No Pleasing You. And Joan admits there are drawers stuffed with music she can’t open at her home near Stevenage, Herts.
But last year son Nik – who played drums for Chas and Dave – decided to pay tribute to his dad by pulling together the tracks for the new album, Right At Home.
That’s when Joan listened to Chas’s music again. She says: “It’s taken a while...but now I can enjoy and love it.
“It’s great that he’s here and his voice is filling the house again as it should.” She can still be hit by feelings of grief. Recently she was reduced to tears after finding a letter she wrote in 2002. “It was a love letter to say how much I loved him, admired him and all the rest of it,” says Joan.
“That just knocked the socks off of me. I had a good old cry, I blooming did. It can happen but you can’t bottle it up. It doesn’t do you any good.”
Joan keeps a little shrine – an everlasting rose, photos, a love poem he wrote and that flickering candle – in what she calls “Chas corner”.
She had to give up his allotment – the subject of her favourite track from the album, Rock ’n’ Roll Allotment.
But she donated his greenhouse to a school. She says: “They call it Chas’s greenhouse. He’d be over the moon.”
Joan is now writing her memoirs. She says: “He used to say to me, ‘Come on, finish that book.’ So, I’m writing every day.
“I might call it From Bunny To Rabbit, because it’s from me to Chas and Dave.”
She adds: “We were together for so long. And, always, the minute I heard him coming in through the door, I’d get excited he was coming home.
“That never, ever stopped, even after 52 years. I loved him all my life.”
Right At Home: Selected unreleased home recordings 2007 – 2017, by Chas Hodges, is out now, via the Demon Music Group.
We had a marriage of love. Chas & Dave had a marriage of music JOAN HODGES ON HER LATE HUSBAND’S LIFE
FRENCH police are investigating whether the murders of three members of a British family in the Alps in 2012 were linked to an alleged plot to assassinate a hypnotist.
Surrey engineer Saad al-hilli, 50, was on a family holiday when he and his wife Iqbal, 47, and mother-in-law Suhaila al-allaf, 74, were shot dead along with French cyclist Sylvain Mollier, 45.
The al-hilli’s daughters Zeena, four, and Zainab, seven, survived the attack near Lake Annecy.
Now it has emerged that ammunition which would fit the Luger P06 pistol used in the Alps murders was found at the home of a man arrested over the failed attempt to kill corporate coach and hypnosis expert Mariehélène Dini, 55, near Paris.
According to police, Ms Dini just missed being shot by a hit squad hired by a professional rival, who allegedly paid more than £60,000 to have her killed.
Officers arrested two men armed with a military-issue pistol and silencer who were waiting in a car outside Ms Dini’s home in July last year, following a call from a suspicious neighbour.
At the time, the men falsely identified themselves as part of the General Directorate of External Security, the French equivalent of MI6.
They claimed to be on an official mission to kill Ms Dini because she was implicated in something involving Mossad, the Israeli secret service.
Detectives have long pinned hopes on tracing the 7.65 calibre bullet casings found at the scene of the al-hilli killings. They have spent years trying to identify the source of the 21 bullets fired from the weapon, a gun formerly used by Swiss soldiers.
The al-hillis were shot dead at pointblank range in their estate car. Daughter Zainab was shot once, but survived. Zeena hid under her mother’s skirt in the back of the car until she was discovered many hours later.
In 2013, Saad’s older brother Zaid was arrested by Surrey Police on suspicion of ordering his brother’s murder, but was released without charge.
He welcomed the latest development in the case. He said: “I think this is plausible. I have always believed [the cyclist] Sylvain Mollier was the target, and it was an assassination that went badly wrong. I think there is no other explanation. I always believed there was a cover-up.”
Several men have been charged over the attempted murder of Ms Dini, including one identified as Daniel B, thought to be head of the hit squad.
He is a retired police officer who had worked in the police intelligence service.
Daniel B identified the client in the contract as Jean-luc AB, a business coach who had a grudge against Ms Dini over her bid to create a professional association of corporate therapists.
Daniel B said he and Jean-luc AB knew each other as members of a Masonic lodge near Versailles. The former inspector reportedly claimed to be part of a “tiny group of freemasons who had turned their hands to carrying out hit contracts”.
It has also been reported that Daniel B admitted to taking part in a separate case, the murder of racing driver Laurent Pasquali, 43, in September 2019.
I always believed Sylvain Mollier was the target ZAID AL-HILLI BROTHER OF MURDER VICTIM