Ted Lasso star Annette Badland played villain Babe Smith in EastEnders for three years, and her portrayal was so convincing that the BBC received serious death threats on her behalf
Annette Badland in EastEnders as Aunt Babe(Image: BBC)
BBC bosses issued a rare “red alert” safety warning to former EastEnders actress Annette Badland after a crazed fan sent death threats that were deemed credible by security experts.
The individual behind the chilling threats was never definitively identified, Annette said. Speaking on Sally Lindsay’s podcast, Annette explained on Sally Lindsay’s podcast: “Because I was leaving, they racked up my villainy and I actually got thrown out of, literally, thrown out of the pub by Danny and cursed them.
“But I had death threats. I got the call from the BBC security saying, ‘We’re getting death threats. There are red alert code words in this, so we have to take it seriously’.”
She was warned that she should only leave her house if it was absolutely necessary, and that if she did go out, she shouldn’t tell anyone where she was going.
Annette says she was effectively under house arrest throughout the six-week investigation: “They eventually traced it to just outside Liverpool. It was in a school, but they didn’t think it was a child. But because it was a public computer they didn’t feel they could get much further.”
Despite that harrowing conclusion to her EastEnders tenure, Annette says she cherished her time on the BBC soap. She holds particularly warm memories of Danny Dyer, whom she describes as “bright, kind-hearted…and daft.”
She recalled Danny’s extraordinary generosity, revealing he taught her to “say the C-word,” which proved tremendously useful when she moved on to Ted Lasso and was handed a script riddled with crude language. She joked: “I said to myself, ‘I’ve worked with Danny Dyer, I can do this’.”
Ironically, however, that “very funny” scene ended up on the cutting-room floor and has never been seen by the public.
It was an unscripted moment, early in her EastEnders stint, that made the show’s writers recognise that in Babe Smith, they had the foundations of a truly iconic villain: “I had a scene with Tim [Timothy West, who played Stan Carter on the show] and he was watching the television.
“I’d been in love with him when I was young and he’d married my sister and I didn’t like that – that was the cause of all my pain and anguish.
“It wasn’t scripted,” Annette added, “but I picked up the remote control and turned the television off. I told him what I thought, put the telly back on, and left. And I think they thought, ‘Ooh, she can be nasty’.”
What followed was three years packed with drama, reaching its peak when Babe was locked inside a freezer and left for dead by an unknown attacker, who was ultimately unmasked as Lorna Fitzgerald’s Abi Branning.
In a dramatic farewell, Babe was caught red-handed stealing from the Queen Vic’s safe, but it was her savage outburst at Linda [Kellie Bright] – branding her a “stuck-up cow” – that saw Mick Carter finally remove her from the pub, and banish her from Walford for good.