After my drink drive charge, they felt he wasn’t as supportive to me as I’d been to him in the past They said, that’s it as far as we’re concerned. My Mum always used to come up once a week, but she stopped and said she didn’t want to see him I couldn’t live like that I wanted us to be all together – lovely and happy. But it doesn’t work that way.”GILLIAN Taylforth’s own childhood does sound lovely and happy – like a close-knit EastEnders family, except she was brought up in north London. “There were dozens of us, bro- thers, sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins, all living off Upper Street in Islington, mostly in four neighbouring blocks of flats.” Her father, who was a printer, comes across as a bit of a tartar. “Dad had very strict ideas on what jobs the woman of the house should do and the man should not, like all the washing, cooking, ironing, child rearing, and the rest.” Gillian, who was their second child, lived at home until she was 26 – before her big break with EastEnders, when she was still working as a secretary between small acting jobs – and her father laid down the law about what time she had to get in at night. She talks about him and her brother Ronnie with pride: how they used to protect her and her sisters, chasing away muggers and thugs and things that go bump in the night.I tell her that they sound protective, but also bossy.

Is that how she expects men to be?She says that there was a big difference between her father and Geoff. “My Dad was old-fashioned, very Victorian, a strong person in the family Geoff is chauvinistic. He would say things to me [about how she couldn't go out without him] and I’d say, ‘Excuse me, you’re not my father Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do You don’t own me. I’m not an appendage.’ “Why, then, one wonders, did she stay with him for so long? Here she is – a successful, attractive woman – with a man who ticks her off in the newspapers for going out drinking with her friends from EastEnders (“they’re idiots, the lot of them” he was quoted as saying in the Daily Mail); and who is clearly a hard man. When I ask about this, she shrugs, and says, “There’s that age-old saying – every woman loves a bastard. There’s that thing of the chase – you say, I’m going to be the person who tames him.”Although many journalists have speculated that Gillian loves Geoff because she had an autocratic father, the truth of the matter may be rather more complicated than that.

She never seems to have wanted any of the nice local boys who her parents knew and approved of: and going out with a man like Knights was, perhaps, her first real act of rebellion. She clearly didn’t want to settle down and have babies in her twenties as her mother had done – she was too busy trying to make it as an actress, and have a bit of fun at the same time. And you can see why she fell for Knights: when they first met, she was already becoming a celebrity, and so was he, at least in that world where real men drive fast cars and make loads of money and drink champagne at Stringfellows. Like her, he’d come from a large working-class family, and they were both moving into a different sphere. Why not enjoy their good fortune together?Apart from anything else, she claims to have seen a kinder, softer Knights (the man she nearly tamed, at least in her own mind?) “I read the agony aunts in the newspapers telling me what I should do,” she says (they’ve all been begging her to chuck him out), “but they don’t know Geoff. They don’t know the side of him that I know.” She cites his “love of animals”, though her illustration of this is somewhat surprising. “He arrived home with a pheasant which he had found at the side of the road.