Life on the front line is still so vivid for Kemp (From Darlington and Stockton Times)

Life on the front line is still so vivid for Kemp

2:21pm Friday 26th June 2009

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Former EastEnders star Ross Kemp talks to Hannah Stephenson how his experiences in Afghanistan with the troops, as featured in his Sky One series and accompanying book, have changed him.

ROSS Kemp has been dreaming about Afghanistan since he returned from Helmand Province, where he made a hard-hitting documentary series.

In one nightmare, he is playing football against the Taliban in the dark and the ball is an explosive. The opponents are wearing Afghan dishdasha robes, he is wearing body armour.

No-one knows when the explosive is going to go off, so they keep passing it back and forth across the halfway line.

“I always awoke before the explosion, safely in my comfortable bed at home,” he writes in the paperback tie-in to accompany his awardwinning Sky One series, with the book entitled Ross Kemp on Afghanistan. But there’s no doubt his experiences as an observer of that conflict have changed him.

Kemp joined his father’s old regiment, the Royal Anglians, and after training on Salisbury Plain and learning how to use the SA80 A2 standard rifle of the British Army, he and his camera crew found themselves in the thick of it in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand.

The series wasn’t airbrushed, he wasn’t reporting from a distance like many war correspondents – it was real.

He talks candidly about his time there but you sense he’s wary of journalists, and there’s an edge, a mistrust, a fear of hidden agendas in anything which appears in print about him.

As someone who was married to Rebekah Wade, the first female editor of The Sun, until their divorce earlier this year (although they had been separated for several years), he probably knows the machinations of the media better than most and has always refused to discuss his private life. Today is no exception.

However, he has changed since Afghanistan, he says.

‘I think I appreciate life a bit more. We all fall victim to being rats in a rat race, but I’ve slowed down a bit. I’m more appreciative of the good things in life.”

The Essex-born son of a policeman and a hairdresser has always been known as a “hard man” of telly, first as Grant Mitchell in EastEnders and later in the ITV series Ultimate Force.

Kemp is patron of the charity Help For Heroes, which supports injured troops.

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