EastEnders’ Billy Mitchell star’s near-death experience that put him in hospital

Eastenders: Perry Fenwick dodges question on Christmas special

Perry Fenwick has admitted he had multiple brushes with death as a child and was constantly in and out of hospital, starting when the EastEnders legend electrocuted himself at the age of three.

Recalling the time he plunged his water-soaked fingers into a power socket, the 61-year-old revealed he is lucky to have lived to tell the tale.

“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,” he told Kathy Burke when he appeared as a guest on her morbid Where There’s A Will, There’s A Wake podcast.

His mother, who was occupied with watching television at the time, was suddenly alarmed to see him flying “right across to the other side of the room”.

“Apparently, the palms of my hands were black for about six months after that,” he exclaimed.

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That wasn’t the only scrape that saw him hospitalised – with Perry admitting he spent “quite a lot of time” in hospital as a child, especially between the ages of nine and ten.

Another terrifying experience saw him tumble off a bridge which was almost 30ft tall – and then pretend to be dead in the hope of getting the “kiss of life” from a girl who was at the scene.

Recalling the moment, he explained: “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.”

He accepted his friends’ challenge but ended up having a “wobble” and falling off it.

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“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,” Perry continued on the podcast.

He added that, as the accident had happened way back in the 1960s, if he’d collided with one of the sleepers, “that would have been it”.

Fortunately for him, he fell into some soft mud, meaning his life was saved – but in an act of vengeance against the friends who had dared him, he “played dead”.

“Even at that age, the actor in me just wanted to see ‘What did they think of me?'” he mused.

He was in for a nasty shock when he overheard others discussing whether they should call the police, and then opting not to in case they were sent to prison.

Unsure of whether or not he was dead, the girl that he “really fancied” then urged his friends to throw a stone at him.

“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!” he groaned.

The full story is available for listeners to check out on Kathy Burke’s Where There’s A Will, There’s A Wake podcast, downloadable here.

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