Larry Lamb has spent over 35 years in entertainment, and is perhaps best known for his roles as Archie from Eastenders and Mick from Gavin and Stacey. But did you know he is also a champion for charity? Hannah Gannagé-Stewart caught up with Larry Lamb to talk about his career and work with charities.
You are hoping to encourage a better understanding of hearing loss. How does being in the public eye help you to do that?
I act as an ambassador for hearing loss awareness, particularly with Action on Hearing Loss. You can be quite effective at this if you’re someone who is out and about in public life – particularly if you’re of a certain age. I’m in the demographic that are probably going to be affected by hearing loss whether they like it or not. To become known as a person that has suffered hearing loss and is not ashamed of wearing a hearing aid actively supports the promotion of that idea.
You suffered hearing loss after falling ill with malaria. How soon did you realise your hearing had been affected?
I had a fever while suffering from malaria, and I was feeling so desperately ill that my ear problems didn’t really register as something that wasn’t going to be fixed until I’d gone on a couple more weeks. In the end I went and saw a specialist and they did all the tests and said ‘you’ve lost 80 per cent of hearing in your right ear, you’ve got an infection in there and that’s what’s caused the damage’. Interestingly enough, when I said ‘What, from having malaria?’ he asked if I’d had mumps and measles as a kid, and I had. He said a lot of children go deaf with those two illnesses.
What does it feel like to have lost that degree of hearing?
Without my hearing aid, about half of my hearing facility is more or less gone. One of the side effects for me was absolutely unbelievable neck aches on the right side where I had been straining to listen. We all have an automatic in-built radar system that adjusts to make sure our ears are working in the absolute optimum way. When the way you’re used to hearing sound is thrown into turmoil, what happens is that your neck is constantly working to get your good ear round to do the work that it knows your bad ear can’t do.
As an actor your hearing is pretty important, what was your first thought when you found out?
Not good, not good at all. You start off thinking that you’ll have to try and muddle through but then reluctantly you think, ‘well, I’m going to have to do something about this’. I was working on a play in the theatre at the time. We were in a terribly noisy rehearsal room; there was this constant racket from out on the street, meanwhile we were trying to accommodate everybody speaking in this big echoey room, and all the noise from the traffic just made it impossible. So I knew I was going to have to get something done.
When exactly did all this happen?
I got malaria at the beginning of 2010 and then, during the spring time, I finally realised I was going to have to get myself sorted out. I was in Senegal on behalf of a charity called Plan UK, which supports some of the world’s poorest children and helps them work their way out of poverty. I was there to raise awareness and publicise their work. I still donate money to a fund that goes towards helping these kids.
Your appearance on ‘Who do you think you are?’ revealed that your ancestry traces back to the famous Martini Bartlett lion tamer. Would you say entertainment is in your blood?
I found it fascinating to understand a side of me that I knew nothing about; it was something really very special for me. I had no idea that my background was anything to do with showbusiness at all and had always assumed that it was just some accident of fate that I’d ended up spending 35 years doing it, only to realise that, in actual fact, had you known about your family history, the chances are you would have pursued it anyway.
Your son George is in television too. Was that passed down from you?
My son is an interesting character; he’s somebody who just got into it without any encouragement from his mother or me at all - in fact quite the opposite. So I’m sure it’s genetic, I’m sure my daughters will finish up being entertainers too.
Would you encourage them to get into show business?
There’s a difference between encouraging something and engendering it. We didn’t try to engender something in George that would make him feel it was necessary for him to do it. My daughters are both instinctive entertainers, so if they are doing something they enjoy, obviously you try to encourage it. There are so many kids around that have no idea what they want to do, but my kids are probably instinctively and genetically inclined towards that disposition, so it only seems right to nurture it.
