‘I’ve be at from blank it shou been th En shot pointrange... ld have eir day’
SAS: WHO DARES WINS star Mark “Billy” Billingham is telling me about the times he cheated death. “Someone had a drop on me from two metres away,” he says, in a calm, matter-of-fact tone. “It should have been their day. It wasn’t. I was in a room with two people with automatic weapons and it wasn’t their day.
“I’ve been shot at from point-blank range and the bullets deflected off my equipment. I was bloody lucky.”
Billingham, a decorated veteran of the Special Air Service, has just published his first novel, Call To Kill.
“I’m telling my story in a fictional way,” he says, the occasional echo of his native Walsall in his voice.
“We don’t talk about what we’ve done in The Regiment, but the novel is based on a lot of my experiences. It’s also current – it’s what’s really going on, especially in Yemen, which no one talks about, with the rampant corruption and arms sales to fund the war.”
Centring on a hostage release that goes wrong, the book introduces two tough female characters, one a well-to-do Californian weapons dealer, the other a CIA agent who “gets bolted on to an SAS patrol in the last minute”, he says. “It’s all grounded in reality.”
Is the main character Matt “Mace” Mason based on him? “Very much so,” he says.
“It’s all based on people I’ve worked with. I start with a skeleton structure and put meat on the bones. Then Conor” – his co-writer Conor Woodman –
We laugh about things people don’t even want to talk about
“adds the literature.”
It’s Billingham’s second book – his first was his best-selling autobiography, The Hard Way. It’s credited to his nickname Billy rather than Mark because there is already a successful novelist called Mark Billingham – the former comedian who created the Tom Thorne detective series.
“Eighteen months ago, James, my agent, gets me a job on a Saga cruise around Europe. Only they thought they’d booked the other Mark Billingham,” he laughs.
“I had to give a talk on two nights in a 500-seater theatre. On the first night, there was hardly anyone in and those who had come thought I was an author there to speak about my crime books.
“Instead, they got me effing and blinding about jumping out of helicopters and kicking doors in.
“One of the guys in the audience was an ex-air Marshall and he loved it.
“He spread the word and the next day it was packed out. There were so many trying to get in it nearly caused a riot.
“It was brilliant. Everyone on the cruise was between 60 and 90 and they were partying every night.”
On screen, Billy comes across as brusque and ruthless, with a sideline in brutal put-downs – he once told Katie Price, “You’d give an aspirin a headache.”
But the real Billingham is chilled out and family orientated. Friends say he has a heart of gold. “I give people the benefit of the doubt until they cross me,” he says.
Billy talks with obvious affection about his six children, aged 13 to 34, and three young grandchildren.
“I was never there when the kids were growing up, but I love being a grandad,” he beams. He says his children are the reason he started writing. “My daughter and son used to come and pick me up from the pub and listen to the stories I was telling in the bar. Afterwards my daughter said, ‘Dad, we don’t know you. We didn’t know what you’d done.’”
They had a lot to learn. Billy grew up on a council estate, the middle child of five. By 11 he was a skinhead listening to Ska and knocking around with a gang of teenage Mods.
He fought in and out of school, stole, and at 15 was stabbed and left for dead.
That same year he fell into a vat of caustic soda while working illegally at an electro-plating factory, leaving his legs badly scarred. But two things turned the young tearaway around.
A stranger, whose trilby hat he stole, encouraged him to take up boxing, and in 1983 he joined the Parachute Regiment. Billy, now 55, was in the Army for 27 years – most of them in the SAS. A
Mountain Troop specialist, he planned and executed strategic operations around the globe.
Billingham received an MBE for leading a mission in Iraq to rescue a British hostage, and won the Queen’s Commendation for Bravery after using himself as bait to catch an IRA terrorist.
HISTORIC prosecutions of British veterans are “outrageous”, he says. “It should never have got to that stage. They were sent in by the Government and now the Government wipes their hands of them.
“I feel sorry for anyone who died, but the way we’re treating our ex-paras is disgusting. Someone will be made a scapegoat along the way.”
Like many veterans, Billy has a dark sense of humour. “We laugh about things people don’t even want to talk
about,” he explains. “Our decompression is to laugh. We take the Mick. It’s not insensitive, it’s just how we are.
“The best therapy for a soldier is another soldier telling him to stop whinging and sort yourself out. We don’t deal well with sympathy.”
By 2006, Billy had quit the SAS and was working full time as a celebrity bodyguard. Clients included Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Jude Law and Sean Penn – still a good friend.
“He conned me into an acting job,” Billy recalls. “I found myself in Barcelona with Idris Elba and Ray Winstone for a script read-through on The Gunman. I’d never acted in my life!
“Sean said, ‘What’s your problem, just read your lines.’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t say that, I’d say this.’ So he changed them. It was brilliant, great fun.”
Showbiz shenanigans ended in 2016 when Billy was hired to join fellow Special Forces vets on brutal TV reality show SAS: Who Dares Wins. When we speak, he’s in Australia on a break between filming the celebrity and civilian versions of the show.
“It’s piddling down now,” he moans. “It was fine when we were filming.”
He has another UK series to film, but after Channel 4 canned Ant Middleton and Ollie Ollerton, Billy and Jason Fox are the only regular faces left.
“The format is bigger than all of us,” he says diplomatically.
BILLY DIDN’T read much growing up. “I’ve only read three books in my life,” he admits. “Kes, at school, Princess by Jean Sasson and Frank Skinner’s autobiography.” But he enjoys creating fiction. “We’re halfway through writing the sequel. It’s set in Mozambique and very current. A conservation mission ends up in a hostage release drama.
“As I’m going through the plot, I see it as a film. That’s how I envisage it.
“In my mind he’s James Bond crossed with Jack Reacher but a real person.”
And as life returns to normal he’s looking forward to more speaking tours.
“I talk about being a bad kid and I tell them the hat story – only I’m the one with the hat now, trying to inspire kids not to get involved in crime.
“I’m in a very fortunate position. I’m all for helping other people. I’m happy with what I’ve got.
“I don’t get why poverty exists. Why are there so many billionaires when there are kids starving, kids with no education? I don’t get it. It’s obscene.
“I’ve got a platform now – people listen to me. They listened to me in the Regiment on a strategic level and now I have the equivalent of that on Civvy Street. My head is above the parapet and I use it.
“I’m not retiring. I can’t sit still for more than two minutes, I have to be doing something.”
● Call To Kill by Billy Billingham is out now