Older, wiser but no calmer
JOHN ALTMAN FOUND FAME AS NASTY NICK IN EASTENDERS. HE TELLS GARRY BUSHELL HOW HE TURNED HIS BACK ON DRINK AND DRUGS – BUT STILL HAS A SHORT FUSE
JOHN ALTMAN is a lot calmer than he used to be. “I don’t drink anymore,” he tells me. “My wife suggested I stop. I can have quite a short fuse.” She’s been his ex-wife for many years, and even sober, John’s fuse is easily lit.
“Twice now I’ve asked people in the Post Office where their masks are,” he says. “It makes me mad. One of them got quite agitated, saying, ‘Who are you to talk to me? Who do you think you are?’
“But when I asked again, his excuse for not wearing one was, ‘I’m not from round here’.” John laughs. “The other guy said, ‘It’s in the car’.”
The Reading-born actor is best known for playing Nasty Nick Cotton in Eastenders. “Someone says ‘Hello ma’ to me almost every day,” he says. “People don’t come close, though. They tend to shout from a distance. They’re probably worried I might have a knife.”
Nasty Nick always did. He was a terrific character, like King Rat in a leather jacket, and he plagued the BBC soap from the first episode in February 1985 until his death from a heroin overdose in 2015.
“He was a horrible, drug-dealing, racist thug who robbed his mother and had the highest murder count on the Square,” John says. “Yet people liked him.”
Altman, born John Stewart, has had one foot in acting and the other in rock since his teens – his album, Never Too Late To Rock & Roll, is out now.
“The Beatles made a real impact,” he recalls. “I heard Please Please Me and my ears pricked up. Playing George Harrison in The Birth Of The Beatles was one of my proudest moments.”
He was 15 when The Who played Dreamland, Margate.
“Me and a mate got there early for the Saturday morning pictures then sneaked into the main ballroom and hid in there all day. We even got into The Who’s dressing room and left graffiti – ‘Smash your kit up, Keith!’ The gig was sensational. We were so close to the stage Daltrey’s sweat was flying over us. We went back and got their autographs but missed our train. As we were hitchhiking home, a big Lincoln Continental pulled over. My jaw dropped – it was Pete Townshend and his wife. He bought us chips and lemonade and dropped us home to Herne Bay. We went to school on Monday morning and nobody believed us. By then rock was in my blood.”
A drummer and guitarist, John has been in bands off and on for the decades, including The Hitmen, Resurrection, and most famously the Heavy Metal Kids in 2010 when he replaced his late mate Gary Holton on lead vocals.
“I loved it,” he says. “Gary was a hard act to follow. I saw them once at the Music Machine in Camden and he was climbing the curtains.”
John covers his marriage breakdown in his autobiography, In The Nick Of Time (now also an audiobook). He married Bridget Poodhun in 1986, less than a year after they’d been introduced by his costar Nejdet “Ali Osman” Salih.
Drinking and cocaine consumption played a large part in their 1997 divorce, John admits. He gave up both but by then, it was too late. Daughter Rosanna and her daughter now live in Luxembourg.
Currently single, John has kept busy in lockdown. He’s made an “audio movie” called Unsinkable, about a Second World War cargo ship, co-starring John Malkovich and Brian Cox, and forthcoming radio soap Greenborn.
He relaxes by watching movies and listening to music – he’s a recent convert to Joe Bonamassa. “I also walk, cycle and work out in the open air with Jacob Peregrine Wheller, a Ninja Warrior finalist,” he says.
“I try and do something for someone else every day.”
RICHARD BLACKWOOD had been certain he never wanted to reprise his latest role. He was relieved when he came to the end of the run of the play Typical in 2019, which tells the true story of former paratrooper Christopher Alder, 37, who choked to death while handcuffed and lying on the floor of a police station in Hull in 1998.
But then the coronavirus pandemic happened, and the 48-yearold TV star was asked to film the play on stage at the Soho Theatre, so people could watch it at home.
“I actually vowed that I would never do it again, because it was so difficult, and so draining,” Richard admits as he chats after a long day of filming Hollyoaks, the Channel 4 soap he joined last year.
“At that time I had been doing it day in and day out for just under two-and-a-half months, sometimes two performances a day, so I was like ‘I’m not doing this again.’
“But then they came back and said we have been asked to film it and asked me how I felt.
“And I said I do believe I would be doing a disservice if I didn’t bring it to the masses. I thought this is the last time I’m doing it so it’s got to be the best, I owe it to the piece just to give it that final push.”
The inquest jury into Mr Alder’s death returned a verdict of unlawful killing, and in 2002 five police officers went on trial. But all the officers were acquitted on the orders of the judge during the proceedings.
Richard filmed Typical in the summer of 2020 as protests erupted around the world following the death of George Floyd, who was black, under the knee of a white police officer.
“I remember when it happened,” Richard says of Mr Alder’s death.
“I’m 49 this year, I was an adult when it happened. It’s not like I was too young to understand what was going on.
“But also I was of the age where I remember being a teenager and being scared of the police because of knowing that could easily happen to you, being taken in.
“What you would hear is that person died of a mild heart attack. That was always the excuse that you heard when you heard that someone had passed away in custody.
“We, as the black community, understood fully what that meant.
“As a teenager at that time, in the Eighties and early Nineties, it wasn’t necessarily that you had to be worried about other gangs or other guys out there that could cause trouble, that was never really the issue.
“It was always the whole concept of being taken by the police; that was always the scary thing.”
Mr Alder’s sister came to see the final show of the run when Richard was performing it in the theatre, and the actor was terrified about doing her brother justice.
“I never got to meet the man, and I had to play the scene where he died,” he remembers.
“Nobody wants to see that reenacted, as painful as it is knowing it happened.
“That performance was by far the hardest. I could do the play in my sleep but I felt so on my toes.
“When I finished, she came up to me and hugged me and she said ‘My brother would have been so proud.’
“When everybody else was congratulating me, I didn’t hear anybody else, that is all I needed to hear.
“She said ‘You embodied him, that’s what he was like.’ I had never met the man, no video footage of him, there was nothing, so that was the biggest reward.”
Richard says he now believes the audience watching the play at home will see it differently, following the widespread horror and the subsequent protests over the death of George Floyd, as well as other unarmed black people including Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery.
“I think they will be more receptive. I think that what this play will do is just bring it home. You think about a situation like this and you place it in a certain time period. You say ‘Yeah that happened back then in the Seventies or the Eighties, obviously that doesn’t happen now’.
“Then you see a piece and that was 1998... just before the millennium, that just goes to show that this is practically brand new. Anybody that is my age will think it was just yesterday that this happened. The sad reality is that it happens a lot and a lot of it is just not documented.
“Now, when you start to hear unfortunate situations like George Floyd, even if it still doesn’t affect you, it will resonate with you in some kind of way. We want you to feel something and that is really all it is. That is how the change comes.
“I hope people understand this is happening amongst them, and not to turn a blind eye to it, because you can’t un-know something.
“It’s about planting the seed. I’m not expecting people to go out and march and expecting a revolution or anything like that, but sometimes it’s just good to plant a seed.” Richard is hopeful that the legacy of the outrage of last summer will lead to lasting change. “People knew police were killing people in the black community in America, but when you saw George Floyd it became very real. We watched that... it was nine minutes of ‘Oh my God am I watching this person die? Have I just witnessed somebody die who was begging for their life?’
“And that is when everything shifted, you can’t pretend you never saw that.”
I owe it to the piece just to give it that final push
Richard Blackwood on Typical
Typical will be available from Wednesday on Soho Theatre On Demand (sohotheatre.com)