25 July 2023 , 07:46
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EastEnders star Perry Fenwick says he is lucky to be alive having narrowly dodged death multiple times in his youth.
The 61-year-old TV star is known to millions as hapless romantic Billy Mitchell in the long-running BBC soap.
And while he has enjoyed a long and successful acting career that has been running for forty years, Perry almost didn’t live into his teens as incidents involving electric sockets and deadly falls could have taken him to an early grave.
Perry is the latest guest of Kathy Burke on her morbid podcast Where There’s A Will, There’s A Wake in which he discusses his mortality and brushes with death.
The EastEnders star is lucky to be alive having survived electrocution and a deadly fall (WireImage)
(WireImage)Casting his mind back to his youth, Perry recalls almost killing himself when he decided to experiment with water and a power socket.
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He said: “From the age of none to ten, I think I spent quite a lot of that time in hospital. I electrocuted myself when I was three.
“I was playing with a bowl of soapy water on the rug, and I thought how interesting it would be to put those three fingers of mine in the water and put them in that plug hole in the wall. At which point, my mum is watching television and was aware of this ‘thing’ going right across to the other side of the room.”
He added: “Apparently, the palms of my hands were black for about six months after that.”
Perry discussed his near death experiences with Kathy Burke on her podcast Where There's A Will, There's A Wake (Sony)But that was far from the only time Perry nearly snuffed it.
Recalling another incident, he said: “I fell off a bridge. We used to have an iron bridge near where I lived, and you used to have to do this dare where you walked over the arch of this bridge.
“I had a wobble, fell off of it, and it was about twenty-five to thirty feet.
“There was a little stream running underneath it with these mud banks next to it and luckily for me someone had got into DIY early by removing some of the railway sleepers, otherwise as this was in the 60’s, if I would have hit one of them, that would have been it.”
Fortunately, Perry landed in the soft mud which protected him from the fall and he was unhurt - however he decided to exact some revenge on his friends who dared him to perform the dare.
He said: “I could hear the kids who had dared me, my mates, and this young girl who I fancied at the time; I was only about ten or eleven. As I’m lying there, in that millisecond, guess what I did? I played dead.
“I decided, even at that age the actor in me just wanted to see what did they think of me.
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“So, I stayed there, and I could hear them all going ‘he’s not moving, call the police, no we aren’t going to call the police, we’ll have to go to prison’.
“I could hear them getting closer and closer but only so far, and I’m waiting for the girl to talk.
“Then someone said, ‘is he dead?’, and I was thinking ‘come on, one of you say something nice, at least be concerned!’.
“Then the girl that I really fancied just went ‘throw a stone at him’. So, I’m lying there waiting for this kiss of life from this girl, and the next thing I get is a stone in the back of my head.”
Where There’s a Will There’s A Wake is available to listen to on all podcast platforms.