EastEnders icon Michael Cashman reveals how landmark role changed his life: "Because of Colin, I became my father's son"

Michael Cashman says the day he was called to the office of EastEnders’ executive producer Julia Smith was like being summoned by the school principal.

It transpired that the BBC’s top brass were becoming increasingly nervous about the scenes between Cashman’s character Colin and his romantic partner Barry – specifically them sharing the first gay kiss on the lips in a British soap – and wanted writers to tone it down because of what was being written in the press.

Cashman had seen the papers for himself. “Filth: get this off our TV now,” said one headline. “EastBenders!” shouted another. He listened as Smith picked up the phone and said clearly to a BBC chief, “There is no way I’m going to be editing those scenes.” Cashman exhales. “She stood up to editorial and political pressure and it changed everything.”

It is 40 years ago this month that Cashman, a former child actor, first arrived on Albert Square. He remembers: “I always loved EastEnders, but I never thought I’d be in it. But when I went in, Julia told me, ‘We’ve tried to cast a straight actor, but we kept thinking of you.’”

Smith warned Cashman about the backlash that would come his way, playing the soap’s first gay character in an era boiling over with homophobia and, more aggressively, confusion and fear over the transmission of the Aids virus. Smith’s advice? “She suggested I talk to Leslie Grantham about dealing with the press!” he laughs, but she wasn’t wrong.

Cashman remembers a brick flying through his window at home and reading letters of vitriol, despite the BBC’s attempts to prevent them finding their way to him. However, it seems others’ sentiments more than made up for the abuse.

“One lady wrote to me, saying her eight-year-old son had asked her why Colin had kissed Barry. She told him it was because Colin loved Barry the way Mummy loved Daddy, and that was that,” he beams. “That’s why the tabloids hated us. We were getting through.”

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Colin and Barry, played by Gary Hailes, did indeed become part of the furniture of the Queen Vic. “It took three months for Colin to come out, so viewers got to know him as Pauline and Angie did. The stereotype of gay men had been destroyed by this ordinary man with his chippy boyfriend living their lives in their community.”

Now, 40 years later, Cashman reports men in their 50s still telling him what a difference Colin made, including one who remembered, “Watching you made me realise I wasn’t the only one.”

If Colin’s presence on the square changed lives across the country, it changed Cashman’s in equally profound ways. In 1989, the same year he departed EastEnders (save for a few one-off returns), he co-founded Stonewall, campaigning for LGBTQ+ rights, and from 1999 to 2014 he served as an MEP and later as the Labour Party’s official LGBTQ+ international envoy.

Made a Lord in 2014, he continues to campaign, the latest step in a journey detailed in his 2020 memoir, One of Them: from Albert Square to Parliament Square.

Most personally, the role of Colin sealed a bond with his father, an otherwise reserved man who enjoyed watching him on TV: “He phoned me up and told me he loved me. He realised that if he’d been gay, he would have stood up, too. Because of Colin, I became my father’s son.”

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