Mirror
24 November 2005
Sid: I used to steal from set of EastEnders
By Frank Thorne and Nicola Methven, TV Editor
SOAP stars Sid Owen and Sheree Murphy admitted yesterday they used to steal from the sets of EastEnders and Emmerdale.
As the pair sat talking in the Aussie jungle they confessed to going on pilfering raids.
And Sid, 33, revealed that angry BBC bosses had even come up with ways to stop the thieving.
He said: "The shop makes me laugh. I used to take all the toiletries. I always wanted a chocolate or something. I used to shoplift and everything.
"Then they used to inject all the Mars Bars with Germolene. Nasty. I tried it."
Sheree, 30, was flabbergasted. She told him: "Well, we heard that but I didn't believe it.
"All our stuff was pretty old on the set. All the sweets were all right, we could rob a packet and eat them. But there were mouldy apples.
"I got caught and got in trouble robbing from the shop. If someone was leaving, the crew would all go to the shop and rob a card."
Sid, who played Albert Square's dim mechanic Ricky Butcher, also confessed to hating the beer served in the Queen Vic.
He told Sheree he had to force down pints during scenes shot before breakfast. "The beer at the bar was one per cent proof. But with no food in your stomach and in the pub all day, we used to get a little bit tipsy," he explained.
Sheree, who was Woolpack barmaid Tricia Dingle in the ITV soap, topped his tale. She said: "Ours was real beer. If you'd been drinking that all day, about 5 o'clock, that's it.
"Everything's real. Not the spirits but everything else. The beer, the bitter, all real. They warn everyone, obviously, to be careful about drinking real beer - at seven in the morning you don't fancy it."
