There’s a few things actress Cheryl Fergison would like the world to know.
She doesn’t live in Albert Square, she doesn’t go drinking down the Queen Vic and - while she will indulge the occasional “Oi Hev!” - Heather Trott is not in fact real.
But, yes, she is still with her Moroccan toyboy 21 years her junior, they are still happily married and - as they’re planning their upcoming 11th anniversary - she is indeed confident he’s not a golddigger, as the sniggerers once cruelly suggested.
In reality, Cheryl has long stopped caring what the haters think about her love life - except to point out, that despite popular belief, her beloved Yassine el Jamouni [CORR, INTERNET IS WRONG] is not, has never been, and has no immediate plans to become, a goatherd.
“My son Alex asked his Alexa: ‘Tell me a fact about Cheryl Fergison’,” says Cheryl, 56. “And Alexa goes: ‘Cheryl Fergison is married to a goatherd from Morocco.’ Why’s that the first fact that comes up? And it’s wrong!
“We don’t have any goats. We’ve never had any goats near us! But that’s the first thing people say. I find it really difficult to pin down why - There’s racism, sexism, ageism - all the isms are there when people talk about our relationship.
The world has become so cynical. People think it’s got to be a con, it’s got to be a problem. But I say, ‘It hasn’t got to be anything. Just stop it!’”
Cheryl’s amused, bemused and frustrated all at once. Over five years from 2007 she had won our hearts as EastEnders’ unlucky-in-love Heather, the big-hearted George Michael obsessive.
So when Cheryl fell for her second husband online in 2010, travelled to his hometown of Agadir, Morocco, and had married him by June 2011, some unfairly reacted as if gullible ‘Hev’ had just got herself in another jam.
“It seems to be quite cool for the men, like Mick Jagger, to date younger,” says Cheryl. “And it seems okay for them to have someone else two years later.
“But people don’t give any kudos to a woman dating someone younger, even though we’ve been together 11 years.
“Well we don’t care. It really is absolutely water off a duck’s back to us now. I just feel sorry for them, that they need to criticise our life.”
It’s been a decade since Cheryl’s alterego was smashed over the head with a photo frame by Ben Mitchell (a plotline she’s still “unsure was a wise move” on the part of the writers). But only now, thanks to Catherine Tate and her new Netflix hit prison comedy, Hard Cell, might fans finally be able to separate Hev from the real Cheryl. The show’s already in the streamer’s Top 10 and sees Cheryl playing a version of herself, helping inmates do a musical. She soon drops a very un-Heather C-bomb
“It was very liberating!” laughs Cheryl. “I want my own t-shirts with it on! People that know me, know I do have a bit of a potty mouth. But I normally have to reel it in.”
Few know her better than her family. Her son Alex, 22, from her first marriage to Afghani Jamshed Saddiqui, is about to graduate drama school, while she and hubby Yas, 37, have moved near the beach in Lancashire’s Lytham St Anne’s (“I’m on the doorstep if Corrie and Emmerdale want someone”, she laughs, half serious). The couple take regular trips to see his parents in Agadir (armed with sweets and gifts for local hard-up families), and he’ll also take the odd solo trip, like now for Ramadan.
“It’s healthy to have the lives that we have. He’s not by my side everywhere I go,” says the 2012 Celebrity Big Brother star. “It works for us. I am me, Yas is Yas. Alex is Alex and we are a family.”
And Yas is definitely romantic, but in a way which keeps her guessing.
“He’ll do romantic gestures but in his own time,” she explains. “He’ll never be told to do something. So when he does do something it really comes from the heart.
“One year he was working backstage at my panto. The male lead told him it’s tradition to buy me flowers for opening night. The night comes, and there’s no flowers. Yas tells him: ‘Nobody tells me when I buy my wife flowers.’ Three weeks into the run, I get this giant bouquet. Yas says: ‘See, everyone’s flowers have died, but you have fresh ones.’
“He also has things made for me. They may be the smallest of gestures but I know it’s a gesture from him and that’s all that matters. I took a photo of ‘our beach’ in Morocco and he had it secretly mounted and framed and hung in his parents’ house for when we stay there.”
But it’s memories that matter to her most.
“I don’t believe in Valentine’s Day. And I’m totally not a designer girl. Things can’t go up in flames. Memories can’t,” she says. “So my family go places, we do things together, we laugh and cry. I don’t want gifts for my birthday. I want them to spend the money on us doing things together so we can sit round with a cup of tea one day and go “Do you remember when you...?”
Speaking of memories, EastEnders’s scenes of Hev and Dot Cotton in the launderette have been on her mind since the death of June Brown aged 95, two weeks ago.
“She’d hate people weeping,” says Cheryl. “She was amazing, meticulous, professional, genuinely kind, charitable and very funny. She’d want her life to be celebrated.”
June knew Dot so well she could switch into character halfway through a sentence, without pause. “It was an amazing ability,” laughs Cheryl. “She can be talking to you about something she read in a magazine while they were faffing with the camera, and then in a split second she’ll switch into speaking her lines. The first time I was completely thrown. I said: ‘I’m so sorry, I need 30 seconds’. She turned and said: ‘Darling, you always have to be ready!’. I learned very quickly to only to ever be half engaged in conversation with her on set so I was prepared to go any second.”
Cheryl adds: “She knew Dot inside out. If something wasn’t written the way she thought it should be, she’d be changing it, ‘No, no, darling I Dot wouldn’t have done that’.”
Out of work, June was more like a naughty schoolgirl - at Cheryl’s wedding reception she spent the night wheeling her disabled neighbour off for cheeky cigarettes. And just like the late Dame Barbara Windsor, Cheryl’s convinced June will never stray far from Walford.
“She’ll be in the walls of that place, in the furniture. She’s probably with Barbara [Dame Barbara Windsor] now, having a chat about us all.”
Cheryl’s not far removed from E20 either - she’s Godmother to one of Steve McFadden’s children, and is good friends with onscreen BFF ‘Shirl’, aka Linda “She’s a softie, really” Hendry.
Even so, Cheryl wasn’t surprised the soap got its lowest ever ratings last Autumn - 1.7m, compared to around 7m when she left.
“They need to bring it back down to earth a bit,” she says. “When the sensational stuff becomes like a movie, it becomes a bit like a blur. Arthur stealing the money, Den and Angie’s divorce papers, those were the hearts and lives of real people. The producers need to go out and talk to people. If you wanted explosions, you’d watch Fast and Furious.”
There’s another thing she’d like to see more of on TV too: larger actors in three-dimensional roles.
“We can identify better when someone looks like you is represented,” Cheryl says. “And we do have sex! People like to pretend that we just laugh around being jolly and eating, but we don’t. I saw Pierce Brosnan’s wife, who’s bigger, and was like ’Yeah! Goooo on!’.”
While not against plus-size body positive stars who’ve lost weight, that’s not her route.
“I can understand the Rebel Wilsons and Adeles doing what they’ve done. It’s a health thing. Hats off to them.” she says.
“I thought I’d lost weight, then watched Hard Cell and thought ‘The chins are still there! What happened?.’ But I told myself ‘That’s just you, Cheryl, accept it’.
“I’d have to go on one of those major, major, complete extreme diets. The only thing I’ve not tried is surgery, and I’m not doing that. I don’t really care that much.
“You see bigger people apologising in restaurants, or worrying people are looking at them. I’m always like ‘Eat your food and enjoy it. If people look at me in restaurants, I think, ‘What’s up? Are you jealous of the food on my plate?’”
Calling for better representation seems ironic, considering she was “big Fat Lesbian” Joanna in the now-controversial Little Britain.
Yet, she stresses, the point of such OTT stereotypes is not to poke fun at those being lampooned, but those whose small-minded prejudices fuel such stereotypes. It’s a tricky, nuanced area for a lot of comedy in this super-woke culture, including Tate’s.
“I didn’t have a problem with playing the Big Fat Lesbian,” Cheryl admits. “But I think I can understand how other people might have.”
She stresses there was “no nastiness” in David Walliams and Matt Lucas, but does disagree with the use of blackface.
After all, Cheryl, who divorced Jamshed in 2007, experienced racist abuse because of her husbands, while son Alex has been bullied for being half Afghani.
“Shortly after 9/11, someone heard where Alex’s dad was from - and they spat in his pram,” she reveals.
Alex is close with his paternal grandparents who live in Holland, after fleeing Afghanistan’s Taliban, long before the War On Terror. Alex, and therefore Cheryl, will only have distant relations in Afghanistan now, and don’t know how many. But Alex and his mum feel passionately about helping refugees, and he’s been trying to help after the terrible scenes during the UK’s withdrawal last year.
First though, the pair are looking forward to a big family and friends night in, where they’ll all be “bingeing Mac n’ Cheese, cheesecake, and Hard Cell.”
Unbeknown to Catherine Tate when she wrote the part, Cheryl actually did do drama workshops in prisons for hardened felons, including convicted murderers, before she was famous. “People were respectful to me, then you’d hear what they’d done,” remembers Cheryl. “It’s weird because you felt less safe after you knew, but had been fine before. So I learned to judge people on how they treated me.”
Of course, Catherine’s comedy is a lot more funny than real life, but it does have a tragic twist. “The first episode I was laughing. The last one I was crying,” says Cheryl. “I was like how did that happen? Catherine is very very clever.”
Her next job films in the summer but is still under wraps. After that she’s hoping to pitch a family travel show with her, Alex and Yas. “There’s a lot of father and son ones - Bradley Walsh and his son, Martin Kemp and his,” she says. “But you don’t get many mother and son ones.”
Her next job films in the summer but is still under wraps. After that she’s hoping to pitch a family travel show with her, Alex and Yas. “There’s a lot of father and son ones - Bradley Walsh and his son, Martin Kemp and his,” she says. “But you don’t get many mother and son ones.”
And in the far more distant future, Cheryl’s dreaming of a retirement in her second home. Not Albert Square, Agadir.
“That would be the dream,” she says. “Who knows, maybe when I’m in my 80s, you’ll find me on the beach in Agadir doing Henna, with Yas by my side.”
Beats a retirement doing service washes in the Walford Launderette for sure.
Hard Cell is on Netflix now.
Have you got a burning question for Cheryl Fergison? She'll be answering all your questions about EastEnders' Heather Trott, Catherine Tate's Hard Cell and more as she joins Daily Mirror's Jess Saying Live, Tuesday, April 19, 2pm. Watch via facebook.com/dailymirror/live or via the Daily Mirror YouTube Channel.
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