Den vs. Phil: Don’t Get Better Than That
By Michael McCarthy
A combination of Mack the Knife, Richard III, The Godfather and Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade. He’s back. It could only be Leslie Grantham, completely inhabiting the body and soul of Dirty Den Watts.
The marvellous character actor Sidney Greenstreet, a.k.a. Casper Gutman, describes Bogart’s Sam Spade thus: “You are a character, sir, one never knows what you’ll say or do next.” If that isn’t Den Watts to the life, I’ll eat my pen, nib and all.
It’s been 14 years since Den’s body was fished out of the canal – a victim of that old adage: When you dance with the devil – Jack Walton – you pay the piper. Sharon saw her father buried. Den left behind not one, but two daughters, Sharon and Vicky, the offspring of his affair with the teenage Michelle Fowler, Sharon’s best mate.
Flash forward. Sharon owns the club left by Steve Owen and renamed “Angie’s Den” for her mother. Vicky, now a precocious teen, is living with Sharon. They are a family of sorts. At this juncture, Dennis Rickman, having been in prison for GBH, enters their lives when he comes to stay. A product of an abusive home, Dennis suffered both physical abuse from a number of his mother’s boyfriends and psychological neglect. He has never known the love and security a family is capable of. Fatherless, the young Dennis fell in love with Jack Dalton, a murderous Fagin who used the vulnerable boy and turned him into a criminal. Both father and son fell under the influence of this vicious crime boss.
Slowly, Dennis comes to accept his family and allows himself the trust he could never accept on the street. And then Jack Dalton, Dennis’s surrogate father, rears his ugly head, pitting Phil Mitchell against Rickman. Dennis must kill Phil or die himself. An alliance of need forms between Phil and Dennis, each wanting to protect their family, Phil with Kate and his daughter Louise, Dennis with Sharon and Vicky. Phil Mitchell, the tough guy of the Square, can’t bring himself to do the deed, so he hands Dennis the gun. Once Dalton is dead, Phil moves to implicate Dennis with the police and with Andy Hunter, Dalton’s successor. Phil even pays to have Dennis beaten up. When Sharon confronts Phil in the Vic, she slaps him, and Phil slaps her back.
Dennis has been harbouring a secret. It seems that their father is alive. Sharon refuses to believe it, but Vicky takes it on herself to track down Den Watts and bring him back to Albert Square, right after Dennis and Sharon, in another twist to the storyline, have made love.
And there he is, Den Watts, back at the Vic, oozing that elusive combination of sex and danger. He and Sharon, father and daughter, have at each other. She rejects him because of 14 years of silence, and he walks out of the Queen Vic and onto the dark streets of Walford. One episode ends with Leslie Grantham, a sleek jungle cat, moving through his old hunting grounds. The walk, the way Grantham moves, and the eyes, reflecting a series of very mixed emotions in a silent war, all contained in a mass of contradictions, make words unnecessary. This is the art of an actor on top form, with these violent emotions coming one on top of the other, raising melodrama to raw, naked, genuine feeling.
Dennis Watts has come back to his family, and no one, not even Phil Mitchell, can get away with slapping his “Princess.” Phil Mitchell has met his match. An earlier episode is set in a tunnel, where Den talks Lisa out of shooting Phil. This episode ends with Den telling Lisa there are other ways to deal with Phil. Den Watts versus Phil Mitchell. It doesn’t get any better than that. Postscript: My research took me to an interview with Leslie Grantham in Albert Square & Me, edited by Larry Jaffee. I quote Leslie Grantham on Den Watts (interviewed by telephone by Larry Jaffee). “A ducker and a dive. He’d do a deal here and he’d do a deal there, and it always sort of ends coming back on him. Den’s problem was he was a big fish in a little pond. And that was all it was!”
I must beg to differ with Leslie Grantham. I’m sure that he truly believes his assessment of Den Watts. But in any creative process, whether in acting or in writing, there is sometimes a disconnect between conscious thought and the unconscious. The mind is saying one thing and the instincts are saying just the opposite. Craft, beauty and art, when they connect, create something far greater than the separate parts. And when it all comes together, it’s our hearts and not our minds that respond. We feel and are moved emotionally. Whether it’s the writer, the actor, the director, they have transcended their craft and tricked us all into participating from our own life experience. It’s in the eye of the beholder!
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