Beauty has taken on the beasts
I’VE always thought it ironic that soap stars have such trouble washing their hands of the role that made them famous.
Indeed, there are very few who’ve successfully shaken off the baggage that comes with years spent pressed, three or four evenings a week, against the nation’s cerebellum on shows like EastEnders and Coronation Street.
All that’s usually left available to them are occasional cameo parts on Casualty as “elderly Cockney man with mysterious blood disorder”, a few weeks sweatily chancing the cha-cha-cha on Strictly Come Dancing or a few turns as Dick Whittington/ Captain Hook at the Stockport Plaza’s annual Christmas panto.
(The latter’s especially true of John “Nasty Nick Cotton” Altman, who’s now worn more tricorn hats than the entire supporting cast of The Pirates of the Caribbean movies.)
Even those who do make it out relatively unscathed tend not to stay away.
Look at Ross Kemp, who – despite always reminding me facially of Roger De Courcey’s Nookie Bear – used his Grant Mitchell hard-man persona to recast himself as warzone-hopping investigative journalist – a kind of Kate Adie and Andy McNab protein smoothie.
And then there’s Lacey Turner who, in 2010, vacated her role as Albert Square’s main sparring partner for the four horsemen of the apocalypse – death, pestilence, fire and flood, the girl flossed her teeth with ’em daily – only to return in 2014.
During that hiatus she managed better than most to cast off the ghost of Walford, no small thanks to her lead role in the first series of the Beeb’s British Army drama, Our Girl.
Granted, Helmand Province was probably like a de-stress session in a floatation tank compared to the covered market misery of EastEnders, but still.
And, last week, was former Corrie star Michelle Keegan’s turn to swap the velour trackie bottoms and pint pulling in the Rovers for camo gear, assault rifle and dodging IEDs on the Somalian border.
Rather too glam to pass as a plausible army medic on a humanitarian mission to Kenya (apologies to all the sexy squaddies out there now indignantly scrunching up their copy of the paper), she spent much of the episode smouldering behind her fake tan (useful for blending in during sandstorms) and fluttering her false eyelashes in the face of fear itself.
In fairness, though, Keegan held her own as the all-action girl – proving she was more than a match for a sexist colleague by offering to chemically castrate him if he called her “sugar t*ts” one more time.
Nevertheless, the rest of Our Girl felt like a largely improbable hour of poorly drawn caricatures, clunky exposition and big burly men ending every sentence with a yelled “ASAP!”.
And talking of “ASAP”, episode one didn’t half shoot by at a lick – Keegan’s Lance Corporal Georgie Lane getting jilted at the altar, nearly blown up in a mortar attack and then taken hostage by machetewielding al-Shabaab resurgents, all in under 60 minutes.
What is more, I couldn’t help thinking, as they dragged her off by her luxuriant chestnut tresses into the back of a waiting van, that she could have made her escape quite easily.
Had she simply unclipped her hair extensions she might have been away on her toes and back in base camp for a quick sea kelp facial peel and eyebrow shaping before lights out.
War is hell? Well, it can certainly play havoc with one’s beauty regime.
Michelle Keegan as Lance Corporal Georgie Lane TALKING of Grant Mitchell, his return to Albert Square has been such a damp squib.
Even his long-promised showdown with Ben’s kidnappers proved to be little more than him waving a baseball ball around shouting, “Come on then!”
Or, as they call it round my way, “closing time”.