Ross Kemp on ...

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I'm just watching the first episode of the new series now and I think it will interest you in particular Aja, as it's about the gang wars in Jamaica. There's a small, but useful, amount of history about the development of the troubles in the first place.

I've seen some other press about the show, including a bit where he is caught up in a serious incident with Polish football hooligans, in which one of the cameramen was battered...

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episode 0301 - Jamaica

Direct download FLV

[Aja]

cheers Face ..I will Take a look at that later .......

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A hard act to follow
He's been a soap star, one of Tony's cronies, a pantomime villain, an award-winning documentary presenter and a husband. But is Ross Kemp still in search of his ideal role? Gareth McLean meets him
www.guardian.co.uk

Ross Kemp and I are sitting in the chess room of the House of Commons, surrounded by plush wallpaper, oil paintings and elaborately carved wooden panelling. In the room next door, a group of MPs - including junior defence minister Derek Twigg - has just watched a screening of Ross Kemp in Afghanistan, a documentary series he has made for Sky. In it he trains with B company of the 1 Royal Anglian and then travels to Helmand province, where he lives - and almost dies - alongside them. Tea arrives, delivered by a very jolly man who enthusiastically proclaims, "I'm a fan of yours, Ross! I miss you on EastEnders, but you have a better career than that now! It's always a pleasure to see you in person!"

"Thank you, my man," Kemp replies, cordially, before turning to me and saying, through a fixed grin, "Welcome to the surrealness of my life." Surreal is one word for it. On his return from Afghanistan, Kemp went into panto - Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs alongside Bobby Davro in Wimbledon. He plays the Henchman. An evil one, naturally.

"One thing I would hate is for people not to take the Afghanistan film seriously because I'm doing panto," he says. "I had nothing planned and I didn't want to spend Christmas on my own. In a way, it's therapy. Not that Afghanistan has left me traumatised, but I took the job to earn money and for something to do. Otherwise I would have ended up in a bar."

Of course, this war zone/panto juxtaposition is the least of the weirdness in Kemp's life. Despite leaving EastEnders in 1999 and returning briefly in 2005, he has never quite escaped the shadow of Grant Mitchell, the soap's hard man. Other acting roles, most notably that of SAS hero Henno Garvie in ITV's Ultimate Force, were of a similar type. Not exactly in demand as an actor, Kemp turned his attentions to documentary and made Ross Kemp on Gangs, in which he travelled the world interviewing gun-toting, drug-addled gangsters, rapists and murderers from South Africa to New Zealand, El Salvador to Russia. Critics suggested that the show glamorised gangs and was a vanity project, but it won the Bafta for best factual programme in 2007 and spawned a book that has sold some 80,000 copies.

But it isn't just the trajectory of Kemp's career that makes his life surreal. There are the small matters of his marriage to Rebekah Wade, the editor of the Sun, and his high-profile support of Labour. He appeared on stage with Tony Blair at rallies and was, along with his wife, a regular visitor to No 10, activities that saw him labelled a "Labour luvvie". How does he think Gordon Brown is doing?

"I like Gordon as a human being. He's a very bright man. I think inheriting Tony Blair's job was a very hard thing to do and I don't think Tony made it very easy for him to do so. Communication with his audience was something Blair was very good at - to the point of being thespian sometimes - and I think Gordon needs to communicate a bit better. Will he win the next election against Cameron? I hope he does: he's a better politician and I don't want a Tory government. I've met David Cameron. He's quite a nice man. He's obsessed with becoming prime minister, as he should be. But that party only cares about its own."

And what does he think of Blair now that the ex-prime minister advises JP Morgan, the American investment bank that was selected to run the Trade Bank of Iraq?

"No comment." Come on! "I can't. I wish him every success. He's a lovely man." Is he not a bit weird? "He's always been nice to me. Good luck to him, good luck to him in his job. I hope he doesn't work for a bank that profits from the war in Iraq. It'll be interesting if he does. Are you sure about that? I didn't know about that," he says, sounding a little disgusted. "He obviously needs the money."

Kemp pauses. "You're going to get me into so much trouble."

He doesn't really need any help with that. Besides his politics, it is Kemp's relationship with Wade that arouses most interest - and rumours persist that he landed the Gangs series through Wade's connection to Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of the Sun and Sky. The interest in Wade and Kemp's marriage peaked in November 2005, when she was arrested following an alleged assault on him. She was released without charge, but the irony of the EastEnders hard man allegedly beaten up by his wife was lost on no one - especially as the Sun was running a campaign against domestic violence at the time. It seems as though Kemp has been living in the shadow of Wade as well as Mitchell. The couple have since separated.

"I can't talk about that for various reasons," Kemp says. "I've never, ever spoken about my private life and I don't think I ever want to." Predictably critical of celebrity culture, he says, "I'd rather listen to someone talk openly than find out that their pants fell down outside a nightclub. I don't care who they're shagging." Does it worry him that people care who he is shagging? "I think I'm entitled to my privacy. Some people make money out of talking about their private life. I don't. I'd probably back a privacy law like they have in France."

Kemp comes with so much baggage, he's like Joan Collins at an airport. He is a bit grand, but very likeable: self-deprecating and a bit sorrowful. He also comes over as a bit naive. In Gangs, the book to accompany the series, he relates the story of Dennis Makalio, a senior member of a New Zealand gang called the Mongrel Mob, which has a penchant for, among other things, rape. Kemp writes of Makalio: "To this day, he remains a friend." How can he justify such as friendship?

"I can't. That's true, I'm sorry. He's a rapist and a killer but I spent a month and a half in his company and saw him doing incredibly generous things. I wasn't there at the rape and it was only reported that he raped people. But I'm genuinely fascinated by that. What makes a man do that? What's going on in your head to make you feel that way down there when you're going to hurt someone?"

Having come eyeball to eyeball with some of the world's most unpleasant characters and dodged bullets in Afghanistan, Kemp, 43, is keen to expand his repertoire. He is doing a series about child soldiers and would like to do a programme looking at the longer-term effects of war. "There's a sniper who's shot 30 people through the head. He's 19 and goes to Thetford and lives with his mum and dad and gets turned away from pubs for not looking old enough. What's he going to be like in five years' time? Is he going to go into McDonald's one day with a machine gun or an axe? We don't know." And he'd like to look at who really runs the country. "I'd like to look at our class system. Is it the MP that's elected or is it the minister who isn't elected who went to a certain school or university?"

Or is it the tabloid newspaper editor? Don't those people have responsibility for the power they wield? "I agree. I totally agree."

The son of a police officer and a hairdresser, Kemp grew up in Essex and describes his family as "very loving". Both his mother and father were disciplinarians whose work ethic he has inherited. His dad insisted they have Saturday dinner and Sunday lunch together as a family, on which occasions they would discuss politics. His brother, Darren, is an award-winning documentary-maker who has made films about Rwanda and Darfur. What did his dad, who sounds like a man who casts yet another long shadow, think of his ambition to be an actor?

"It didn't go down well to begin with. He had plans of me going off to Hendon as a cadet and being a copper like him. It wasn't the feminine side of me coming out that concerned them, it was more that I wouldn't have a regular income in an insecure profession. If I had kids, I'd probably try to dissuade them from entering the profession."

Does he want children? "Without a doubt," he says. "I've been lucky enough to see some incredible things, to meet some incredible people. I'd like to pass that on to someone."

Fatherhood may be the role that Kemp has been searching for. He misses acting and, while his documentaries have been well-received, he can't imagine doing more than one further series of Gangs. Of Ross Kemp in Afghanistan, he says, "Whatever they think about the rights and wrongs of the troops being there, I hope people have a bit more understanding of what it's like for the soldiers."

The series is a bit Boy's Own adventure - macho, melodramatic and sentimental simultaneously. Though lacking in analysis, it gives ordinary soldiers a voice and goes some way to showing the realities of squaddies' lives: long periods of intense boredom punctuated bytimes of extreme terror.

Outside, lights twinkle across the Thames. It's time for Kemp to go. It's his night off from the panto and he has a dinner to attend. At the Ivy, obviously.

· Ross Kemp in Afghanistan, tonight, 9pm, Sky One and Sky HD.

[Twirley]

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She had a sty in her eye that day - she explained it earlier in the show.

I reckon Madeley clocked her one though! haha

[Twirley]

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