MINDER star Gary Webster has revealed he is still clearing debts he built up when he was declared bankrupt 18 years ago.
The actor and his TV presenter wife Wendy found themselves broke and homeless after Gary couldn’t come up with the £25,000 that he owed the taxman.
But although his career is now on the up, he has admitted he is still paying back the money he owes.
Gary, 59, explained: "We are stable and we are working and things are getting better, so we are on the way up, which is lovely, but it doesn’t happen overnight.
"A drug addict or an alcoholic, they go into the Priory for four weeks and expect the excesses of 20 years before to be over in four weeks. It’s not like that.
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"Nobody gets into debt overnight, it’s over a period of time, so if you’ve been struggling for ten years it will take you about ten years," he told Kaye Adams on her How to be 60 podcast.
Gary was one of TV’s biggest stars in the ‘90s after taking over as George Cole’s Minder from Dennis Waterman.
In 2003 he landed a role on the Channel 5 soap Family Affairs.
He said: "It was good money, but I was making up for the three or four years previous that I’d got myself into debt and I had to pay off debtors.
"This was when there were no understanding debt collecting agencies. They were knocking on the door and they would be wanting their money.
"And we lost the house eventually through that, because we couldn’t keep up with the mortgage payments.
"Anyone who has been through that and worried about the knock on the door or the letter coming on Saturday morning saying you’re going to be cut off on Monday - people don’t do that out of choice, it’s awful."
Gary and Wendy – sister of TV presenter Anthea Turner - and their two sons moved into rented accommodation, but ended up homeless and spent months living in Travelodge hotels.
Gary said: "It wasn’t one thing. We had film projects that were going to be financed, they collapsed and one thing led to another.
"We were coming out of a rented accommodation and were going to go into another one, but that fell through and then we had a period of time where we were looking every day to see where we would be staying.
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"It’s very tough on the children, but we’ve always been open with them and tried to explain that this isn’t because I had been smoking it away or drinking it away, it was just a catastrophic set of circumstances that led us to where we were."
Gary, 59, best-known as Minder’s happy-go-lucky Ray Daley, admitted that the effects of homelessness and debt took their toll on his mental health.
He told How to be 60: "I lost my father quite young and there’s a grieving period and then you wake up one day and you begin to smile, you begin to laugh.
"When I’ve been in debt and it’s heavy and you’re struggling, there is no day that you wake up smiling. You are in grief all the time, there is no good day.
"There was no day I ever woke up when we were travelling from one Travelodge to another that I thought to myself: ‘I’m getting used to this, I can actually function today.’ Every day was a fight, every day was a battle."
Gary, currently starring in a nationwide theatre tour of Twelve Angry Men, said he was relieved his relationship with Wendy, 56 and sons Jack, 24 and Freddie, 20, was not damaged by his debt battles.
He said: "Hopefully Wendy and I are as strong as ever and our relationships with our children are as strong as ever.
"That is something that I will be most proud of – that the effects of what we went through didn’t sully our relationships together and they still look upon me hopefully favourably."
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