It is nearly two decades since Bill Treacher, better known as hen-pecked husband Arthur Fowler, hung up his flat cap and took semi-retirement in sleepy Suffolk. But Bill, 84, still has not managed to escape the drama that is part and parcel of life on EastEnders.
The former star of Albert Square is now battling ataxia, a degenerative disease that robbed him of his balance and the ability to walk, effectively putting an end to his acting career for good.
First he needed a walking stick, then a frame. Now he has to rely on a wheelchair to get around.
“I’m not doing any work now,” he says. “I can’t bloody well walk.”
Bill still received a steady stream of job offers before he decided to retire in 2007 but turned most of them down. There were notable exceptions. He appeared in the film George and the Dragon alongside Hollywood stars Patrick Swayze and Michael Clarke Duncan in 2004.
He also featured in episodes of The Bill and landed a guest slot in Casualty. But Bill quickly settled into a more leisurely lifestyle, happy to spend more time sipping gin and tonic in the garden with his wife.
Bill says: “It was like a weight had lifted from my shoulders. For the first time in 11 years I would wake up in the morning and I didn’t have to be somewhere. It was lovely.”
Bill was the very first actor that EastEnders creator Julia Smith approached when she began assembling the original cast in 1985. She even wrote the role of Arthur with Bill in mind.
But at first he turned it down, afraid the long hours and travel to and from London would stop him spending time with his family in Suffolk.
It took him two days of careful consideration and a long heart to heart with his family before Bill decided the offer was too good to turn down.
He chuckles as he says: “I rang my agent and said, ‘Tell Julia I’ll do it’. She said, ‘I already have.’ As an actor it’s hard to get regular work, it’s not that sort of career. So you don’t turn down a good job.
“And EastEnders was a good job. We had fun and I made some money but eventually it became a bit of a bore. That’s when I decided it was time to leave.”
Bill has never regretted his decision to quit Albert Square after 11 years. In fact he has a secret to confess – he no longer watches the show. He even seems oblivious to the feverish speculation about who killed Lucy Beale, a question which will finally be answered in a live episode to mark the show’s 30th anniversary this week.
Instead Bill asks me what the soap is like now. When I tell him about the “whodunnit?” storylines and the sporadic appearances of East End gangsters, he groans. “A load of rubbish, you mean?” He sounds disappointed.
“I watched the odd thing when I left,” says Bill. “Even then I could see it changing. In my day the storylines were bang on. I was lucky to be part of that. The BBC put everything they had behind it. They had the very best writers working on the show. Now they just get cheap ones.”
Bill never imagined how big EastEnders would become when Julia first offered him the role. At the time the BBC was desperate to stop any details leaking, so their early conversations were cagey.
His first clue that the BBC was planning something big was the offer of a one-year contract, much longer than anything he had come across before.
And when he attended the first press call and read-through at Elstree Studios, in Hertfordshire, it finally hit him just how huge the project was. “It was a vast room but it was crowded with chairs and the place was full of people. That’s when I realised how big this really was.
“Then they threw us straight into it. Our feet didn’t touch the ground for the first three weeks. We were always there.
“The studio used to pull the plug at night to turn off all the lights, just so the production team would have to go home. It’s an endless cycle, you never stop learning lines and shooting scenes.”
Bill was thrown straight into the thick of the action. In the first episode he had to break into a flat on Albert Square with Leslie Grantham (Dirty Den) to search for missing neighbour Reg Cox.
With so many lines to learn and so many scenes to shoot, the cast had little time to relax or socialise.
Bill says: “It was very intense. You saw your colleagues every day but there was no time for sitting around or any of the matey-matey stuff.
“It was solid work all the time. But it was very exciting and that gave you the energy to keep going. As the show went on, everything slotted into place. It became a big machine and gradually the cast became very close.” None more so than Bill and his on-screen family.
He formed a close bond with Wendy Richard, who played wife Pauline, Sue Tully who played their daughter Michelle and Todd Carty who was their son Mark.
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During the early years, the family found themselves at the centre of many of the show’s biggest storylines. Arthur and Pauline became proud parents to Martin, the first baby born on Albert Square. But, as is often the case in soap-land, the lows outnumbered the highs.
Battling Arthur suffered a nervous breakdown, was jailed twice, saw his son Mark diagnosed with HIV and his daughter Michelle leave Lofty at the altar.
Bill, in real life married to Australian-born actress Katherine Kessey, admits that he and on-screen wife Wendy had little in common but they enjoyed acting together and shared a special chemistry. He says: “Wendy and I worked together for 11 years and in all that time never quarrelled.
“Todd was a very nice man and Sue was lovely too. We became a family.
“It was a good job really, because I was with my stage family more than I was with my own. It would have been a nightmare if we didn’t get on.”
It is clear that Bill, who has two grown-up children, Jamie and Sophie, cherishes the memories and friendships he formed on the set. But it was a such a demanding job he often had to spend his spare time reading scripts or filming for the week ahead, leaving little time for family and friends.
Bill says: “One day a fellow came running up to me in the street, shouting ‘Bill!’. At first I thought it was a fan but it was actually my mate from my RAF days.
“I didn’t recognise him because I hadn’t seen him for 40 years. He had the advantage over me because he saw me on the TV every day. It was wonderful to see him. He said: ‘Oh, Bill, you must come and see me, come and meet my wife and kids’. But I said, ‘I can’t, George. I’m sorry, I do nothing but work.’
“He gave me his telephone number, which I’m afraid I lost almost immediately. I never did see him again.”
Eventually the heavy workload took its toll on Bill’s health. By the time he left in 1996 he was on beta blockers to help him cope with the stress and was suffering three migraines a day, some so severe his vision went blurry.
There were even times when he could not see Wendy as they filmed their scenes.
Bill finally realised they had to kill off Arthur before the role finished him. Even so, it took him more than a year before he could persuade bosses on the show. In his final scene Arthur suffered a fatal brain aneurysm while working on his beloved allotment.
Bill says: “Alan Yentob, who ran BBC1 back then, had said: ‘Please don’t leave, Bill.’ But I said, ‘I have to. I’ve done this for as long as I can. If I don’t leave now I’ll be carted off to hospital and you’ll have to change all your scripts. Let me go now. That way you can plan for it.’ So that’s what we did.
“It wasn’t a bad job.”
And on that note Bill is ready to retreat again into his quiet country life in East Anglia, a world away from the hustle and bustle of Albert Square.
- This week’s series of special anniversary EastEnders shows begins at 7.30pm on Tuesday on BBC1.
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