The Scottish Mail on Sunday - You
BACK TO SCHOOL FOR AN EAST END DRAMA QUEEN
Actress Jo Joyner on her new orle as a head teacher, and why the risk of leaving EastEnders paid off
Jo Joyner is a firm believer in taking risks. As a teenager she took a gamble to follow her dreams of becoming an actress and then, having secured a career-making role in EastEnders, she walked away from the show at the height of her fame. Now she is about to star in a new Channel 4 series, Ackley Bridge, as a tough, career-driven headteacher, tasked with merging two divided communities – Asian and working-class British – into one ground-breaking academy school in a fictional northern town, Ackley Bridge. ‘I’ve never felt more committed to a part,’ Jo says. ‘It’s real, it’s relevant; it’s about living in Britain today and celebrating all the cultures that make up this country. I absolutely love it.’
It is, however, a world away from the role that made Jo, 40, one of the most popular stars of the small screen. As beauty-salon owner Tanya Branning in EastEnders she made an indelible mark, lurching from one high-octane crisis to the next – including divorce, cervical cancer, near-bigamy (she was about to walk down the aisle when she discovered her fiancé was still married) and an affair with her husband’s brother Jack, played by Scott Maslen. ‘ EastEnders was always nonstop,’ she says. ‘I loved being part of it.’
In her seven years in Albert Square, Jo garnered four television awards and was caught up in the criticism that hit the BBC over the storyline in which she drugged her cheating husband Max Branning (played by Strictly Come Dancing semifinalist Jake Woods) and attempted to bury him alive with the help of her lover Sean Slater (Robert Kazinsky).
Even after Jo left the series in 2013 (and a one-off return in 2015), die-hard viewers have refused to believe that the whirlwind that was Tanya will not return. Then in February, Jo sent social media into overdrive with a cryptic tweet to a fan who had told her he missed her on the show. She replied: ‘I miss them all too! But I’m up north filming at the moment. I’ll tell more when I’m able.’
Her tweet was met with an onslaught of media speculation that she was on her way back to the Square. ‘That was all my fault,’ she says. ‘There had been a mention of Tanya from some of the other characters on the show and my Twitter feed was full of messages from fans thinking it might mean something. I was in the midst of filming Ackley Bridge but couldn’t say at that point so I posted something cryptic and the whole thing blew up in my face.’
By Jo’s side as we talk is a small suitcase, and I can’t help wondering whether she is ready to start packing for a return to Albert Square now. She sips her tea and raises an eyebrow.
She is not, then, about to return? Jo shakes her head. ‘I am not.’ She has moved on. Since leaving EastEnders she has appeared in TV programmes from Sky’s Mount Pleasant and Trying Again to the BBC’s The Interceptor and Ordinary Lies. Plus, Jo is happily settled in the Warwickshire village where she grew up, which she moved to so that her seven-year-old twins Freddie and Edie could go to the school their mother went to as a child. Whereas Tanya’s life was all about chaos and crisis, Jo’s is all about the calming pleasures of country life: gardening, cooking and hanging out with her family, including parents Peter and Anne and elder brother Dan, who together run First Line, a company that supplies components to the car industry worldwide.
As an actress Jo has spread her wings to take on a whole new series of issues. In Ackley Bridge, she is going from the sharp end of kitchen-sink drama to a politically controversial series about the nature of modern schooling, culture clashes and racial integration.
Made by the creators of the phenomenally successful Shameless, the show – which was filmed in Halifax – was made using scores of local teenagers, many of whom had never acted before.
‘It was an amazing atmosphere,’ Jo says. ‘We were completely immersed in the community and that made the project very special. It’s about schools, kids, families and relationships, and it represents Asian culture in an entirely natural way, using a mix of British and Asian teenagers’ slang. The issue of integration feels really important in this country right now.
‘Before I started working on Ackley Bridge, my mum became involved in a community group that is a sort of knit-and-natter, with local women integrating with Pakistani women through chats and cups of tea. It was something I spoke to my mum about before I took the role.’
In the six-part series, Jo plays super-head Mandy Carter, whose determination to make a success of Ackley Bridge Academy puts an unbearable strain on her marriage to PE teacher Steve Bell (played by fellow former EastEnder Paul Nicholls). Mandy has no desire to have children of her own, opting to deal only with the issues caused by the several hundred schoolchildren in her care.
For Jo, who is married to drama teacher Neil Madden, the idea of not having children was ‘never an option. I was fending off broodiness at the age of 16. Neil and I got together when I was 25 and when we were 28 we started trying for a family. But it didn’t happen.’
Within three years, Jo and Neil made the decision to go for IVF. ‘We tried everything – acupuncture, fertility diets, reflexology, but nothing worked. We had tests and knew there was a slim chance anything [natural] would work, and that was when we made the decision to try IVF.’
At the time Jo was also spending long
I wrote something cryptic on Twitter and the whole thing blew up in my face
hours working on gruelling scenes for EastEnders, including Max’s burial, which was filmed at 3am in the freezing cold, leaving Jo terrified that she was ‘putting myself through something so stressful that my body wouldn’t take to the IVF’. She and Neil had made an agreement that they would try three attempts and then, if none worked, look into adoption. ‘I have always been very clear about what I want,’ Jo says. ‘I wanted kids and I had a plan, but in a way that makes me understand Mandy more because she knows that she doesn’t want kids and her plan is to get on in her career. We went into IVF with a plan. I researched everything: I also understood that IVF is a business, with different clinics offering different options. I knew that I wanted to go for a short protocol treatment.’ In IVF a long protocol treatment involves daily injections of a medication to shut off ovarian function, followed by follicle-stimulating hormones that can produce around 15 eggs. Short protocol treatment involves lower dosages of the medication over a shorter period of time (and is often deemed a less failsafe option). ‘I’m a control freak and I knew the symptoms would be less extreme,’ Jo says. ‘You produce fewer eggs with short protocol treatment but as you don’t go into a sort of menopause you don’t have such extreme emotions and for me it just felt the better way to go. Incredibly, it worked first time. From that point on my whole focus changed.’ Jo continued to work on EastEnders until Freddie and Edie were three, but it is clear as she talks that it was not an easy decision: ‘When I was pregnant with the twins I’d be doing scenes where I was