EastEnders star Annette Badland ‘stopped going out’ after receiving death threats
Former EastEnders actress Annette Badland has recalled receiving death threats when she starred as Babe Smith on the BBC soap and couldn't leave the house for several weeks
Annette Badland has recalled receiving death threats when she was on EastEnders (Image: Rob Latour/Shutterstock)
EastEnders actress Annette Badland had to “stop going out” after receiving death threats. The actress starred as as Babe Smith on the BBC soap from 2014 until 2017, having been introduced as the aunt of Shirley and Tina Carter.
By the time her three years on the programme was up, Babe had proven herself to be quite the antagonist and left when Mick Carter (Danny Dyer) threw her out of the Queen Vic after she carried out a trail of destruction involving blackmail and attempted to kill her own sister Sylvie by leaving her to drown in a storm.
The character was so disliked by the public for her evil ways that one viewer in particular but one viewer took things extremely seriously and the concern was drastic enough for security teams to get involved on a “red alert” level normally reserved for Buckingham Palace.
Annette starred as Babe Smith on EastEnders (Image: BBC/Jack Barnes)
Annette explained: “Because I was leaving, they racked up my villainy and I got literally thrown out of the pub by Danny Dyer. I had death threats, and I had a call from the BBC security saying ‘We’re getting death threats.’ They’d worked for the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace and they said there were red alert code words so they had to take it seriously.
Annette, 75, explained that police got involved but in the end they were unable to do anything about it and she just had to stay in her house for an extended period of time.
Speaking on the A Night in With Sally Lindsay podcast, she explained to the former Coronation Street star: “I didn’t go out, didn’t tell people where I was going, no social media. They eventually traced it to just outside Liverpool but it was in a school, they didn’t think it was a child but because it was a public computer, they couldn’t get much further. It took about six weeks and they just told me not to go out.”
Annette initially starred TV staples like Bergerac and Doctor Who and then went on to appear in children’s classics like The Worst Witch and The Queen’s Nose.
Babe became a huge villain during her time in Walford and one viewer decided to issue death threats to the actress(Image: PA)
In more recent years, she has held regular roles on Midsomer Murders and Ted Lasso but insisted that fame was never something she went looking for, and spoke candidly of the pitfalls that come with being well known.
She added: “It wasn’t that I wanted fame, I just wanted to act. It distorts lives, in the ultimate, real stars how they can function. You don’t have a real life anymore and that’s really difficult. I have found it intrusive sometimes.
“With EastEnders, there one was one day I was talking with a friend about a mutual friend who was dying and suddenly I realised there was a girl videoing the conversation. I said ‘Please, what are you doing?’
“Her dad came over saying she wasn’t doing anything wrong. I asked her to erase it because it was a private conversation. All she had to do was ask.”
