FORMER EastEnders star Carol Harrison has accused the BBC1 show of trying to replace older cast with younger actors during her time on the soap.
The actress played Louise Raymond, mum of Martine McCutcheon’s character Tiffany Mitchell, until 1999. She enjoyed plenty of dramatic storylines including helping the soap win its first BAFTA for Louise’s affair with Grant Mitchell (Ross Kemp).
Carol says the show then axed her because she was ‘past it’, but now she claims it was part of a deliberate ploy to give the entire cast a younger profile.
She said: “I think it was definitely deliberate to get rid of that age group and just have young actors and the older characters who couldn’t be got rid of.
“It wasn’t just me. They got rid of a whole raft of people. They wanted to eradicate the 40 year-olds like you were past it. I was a commodity and I was treated like c**p.
“It was very weird to me, because I’d never experienced it before and it was very painful.”
In one storyline Louise began an affair with toyboy Gianni di Marco who called her an old granny after finding hair dye in her cupboard and another line saw Louise apologising for her figure, saying: ‘my body’s not what it was’.
Speaking in the first episode of Girl Talk, a brand new YouTube show hosted by Melanie Blake, author of the Sunday Times Best Seller Ruthless Women, Carol said: “It was shocking for me, but I thought this must be what happens when you get to over 40, because that’s the way my character was being portrayed and that’s the way I was feeling on that set.
“I thought maybe I was being over-sensitive, it was a character. But it affected my confidence and the way I felt about myself.”
Carol, 66, claimed EastEnders then sacked her without warning. “I had massive storylines over and over and they really worked me and then I found out in the newspaper that I was going,” she said.
“I went up to see the guy in charge and he said: ‘yeah, well, you know we’ve had lots of you. We’ve kind of done you and we can’t afford to keep you on, because we can’t afford to have a highly-paid extra.’
“It was very clear I wasn’t liked by the new person who came in. It was really disturbing because I’d never had that before. In my other working life I’d had fun and support. I couldn’t understand it and I thought: ‘am I doing badly?’ but I wasn’t. I was giving it my all and the audiences were thinking it was great.”
Melanie Blake’s raunchy new novel Ruthless Women is set in the world of fictional TV soap Falcon Bay and sees the show’s stars being undermined by their soap bosses, with the network controller deciding that all women over the age of 40 are past it and starting to feed that into their scripts.
Carol said: “Ruthless Women is amazing, there are so many revelations in it that are true. You’ll read it and think these things can’t possibly happen, but I am here as testament that they did and they do.
“It was difficult to read, because it was so was so much like my experience on the show, but in some ways it was cathartic, because it made me realise it wasn’t just me. I felt like someone was going through it with me.”
Carol, who starred in a 2019 sell-out tour of The Thunder Girls before the pandemic, added: “I had a breakdown after I left EastEnders. I felt totally abandoned.
“It was so difficult to get any work after that, because I was identified with that character and I thought the world had come to an end. I thought I was on the scrap heap at 42.”
The first episode of Girl Talk is available on YouTube.
Ruthless Women is available on Amazon.
Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.hellofaread.com/soap-opera/emmerdale-spoilers-shock-murder-to-rock-the-village-as-paul-ashdales-secrets-are-exposed/
