Loose Women star Linda
‘Knife killings bring back horror of Ben Kinsella’s death. My family will always be haunted by it. We must get tough kids’ to protect all our
Mark says, ‘If only we’d got there earlier...’ but you can spend your life saying ‘if only’ LINDA ON HER HUSBAND, WHO WAS PICKING UP BEN THAT NIGHT
two decades ago. After hearing the Birds cast only got a fraction of what the Only Fools and Horses boys did, Linda demanded she, Pauline Quirke and Lesley Joseph all get a pay rise. And she definitely wasn’t a MeToo victim. When an exec on another show lunged in for a kiss during post-work drinks, she gave him a very different tongue-lashing. “I yelled, ‘What the hell are you doing? You’re married with kids’,” she says. “We had to go to work together the next day, which was embarrassing. But I’ve always been strong enough to say, ‘Go f*** yourself ’.
“Another time I was on an early show of mine and the script said I was wearing a nightdress. The producer asked me to take it off in front of everyone, like it was nothing. So I was like, ‘No, you cheeky f***er’.”
One of Linda’s latest campaigns is to legalise medical marijuana in the UK, after taking part in ITV’s Gone to Pot. She, Christopher Biggins and Pam St Clement met US patients who had been helped by the drug.
Having lost both parents to cancer, and with her sister Tina being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015, she is open to it, if it is properly regulated. “We used to get a joint for my stepdad, who had really bad arthritis,” Linda admits. “It would be the only time he’d get a decent sleep because of the pain. Medicinally, I’m 100% for it.” Linda also recently met epileptic six-yearold Alfie Dingley, whose mother Hannah is campaigning for cannabis oil to help him. As mum to Louis, Bobbie, 21, and Lauren, 34, and gran to Lauren’s children Lila, five, and Betsy, 17 months, Linda says she would use medicinal cannabis on her family. “If one of my grandchildren or kids had something, I would definitely go abroad and get it because I do believe it would help them,” she says. Meanwhile, Linda is increasingly conscious of her own health. She’s aware of her mum Rita’s fight with dementia before she died from cancer aged 75 in 2012.
Linda says: “If I forget something I think, ‘Oh God’. I wouldn’t get tested, though. I don’t want to know.
“My mum once came to my house at 8.30 at night thinking it was 8.30 in the morning and we were going shopping. We’d get to the hospice and for a second she’d recognise us, then she didn’t have a clue who we were. It’s really, really sad.
“My long-term memory is great, but sometimes I have trouble remembering what happened in the last episode of Marcella.” Though Mark, her husband of 28 years, points to another reason.
She jokes: “He says I’ve normally got up to put on the washing or the dishwasher. I’m always multi-tasking.” With so much passion for good causes, it’s no wonder she’s learnt how to do that.