‘When I came back from Afghanistan, I was self-medicating’

Is Ross Kemp an adrenaline junkie? It seems like a fair question, considering the former EastEnders actor has spent the last two decades making the kind of risk-taking, alpha-male documentaries that would give Louis Theroux a heart palpitation. Kemp’s preferred milieu is global hotspots of crime and danger, and when he’s not en route home from Afghanistan, Iraq and East Africa, he’s off to Libya, Haiti or Karachi.

There is a slight impatience in his voice as he repeats the question to me. “Adrenaline junkie?” He shakes his head. “No, I like the camaraderie.

I’ve built great friendships with people in these places, and the appeal (of making these documentaries) has always been that you’re part of the team and you’re doing things that other people aren’t doing.”

I’m going to move on to my next question when he says this. “And the more people criticize us, or look down on us,” referring to the occasional sniffy newspaper review from, as he calls them, “intellectuals,” “the more it inspires us to go out and do things. We’re a team, a group of sisters and brothers who love each other. That is what is important to me.”

His nomadic adventures have now brought him home, and his latest documentary series, Mafia and Britainhe sees the activities of organized crime in our native region being mapped out.

He finds that the Mafia is active not only in London, as you might expect, but also in sleepy suburbs like Woking, Surrey, where wanted men – and they are almost always men – are hiding. Organised crime will always thrive, says Kemp, because it “provides what people want but can’t otherwise get”.

In other words: drugs. The first episode takes us back to 1982, when a prominent Italian banker, Roberto Calvi, was found hanging from the rafters under Blackfriars Bridge. This was not only a sign that the Mafia were unhappy with him, but also that they could commit their murders wherever they wanted, regardless of local law enforcement.

Throughout the series, Kemp often wears a Peaky Blinders cap, talks to former criminals and retired police officers in an attempt to follow the tentacled hooks of organized crime around the world. The 60-year-old is clearly in his element.

“Organized crime is something I have never dealt with before, even when I was a Extreme world “I always thought it was too difficult.”

He has tackled it now because his team has found people willing to talk – mostly informants, people who had betrayed their previous employers to avoid jail time or get a shorter sentence.

Nobody likes grass, but the people gathered here seem very proud of the stories they tell. As if Kemp were a priest, they confess to the murders they have committed and the loot they have taken. Sample quote: “And I shot him in the back of the head. Twice.”

“Honestly,” Kemp says, “I was so shocked I couldn’t remember where I was going. They were just fascinating! You know, I met people who robbed trucks and put people in acid barrels. There’s a human fascination with that kind of behavior, whether you like it or not.”

At least many of his interviewees show some remorse. They are still in hiding, afraid for their lives. They are troubled by bad dreams. One tells him that if he, Kemp, were to kill them now, he would be doing them a favor. It is sobering stuff.

When I ask him if he has ever liked these people – people who invite him into their homes and make him tea, just like regular people – he pauses for a moment.

“That’s a very interesting question. I think they were all charismatic. But look at The Sopranos. Tony Soprano was a horrible person who did horrible things, but the show was smart. It showed him in the psychiatrist’s chair, and we heard what had happened to him in his life, the way he had been treated, so you end up sympathizing with him.

“The same goes for the people I interviewed. They told me they had no choice; this was the world they were born into. But do I agree with what they did? No, 100 percent not.”

Of course, it hardly needs reminding that on EastEnders Ross Kemp was once Grant Mitchell, who, along with his brother Phil, was Walford’s resident hard man. In a way he still is, but now he’s a presenter of the kind of documentaries Andy McNab would enjoy. He’s appeared in the BBC’s EastEnders between 1990 and 1999, but left when ITV offered him a £1.2 million contract to appear in prestige dramas.

“But I clearly failed, because now I’m making these documentaries,” he says dryly.

Mitchell was born in Essex in 1964 and was an actor before landing the BBC soap. His success in EastEnders meant that he was quickly pigeonholed, and so it was always going to be hard to imagine him in anything else. Perhaps that’s why those prestige dramas never really took off? “I think I’m a much better actor now than when I left drama school,” he claims, adding that it’s “frustrating” that other roles never quite hit home.

But documentaries did. The first one came back in 2004 after two other hosts turned it down. “It was about America’s fascination with guns,” he says. He went to Los Angeles to talk to gang members, one of whom bragged that he had survived being shot 23 times. Kemp—a tough guy, remember—told the gang member he didn’t believe him, “so he pulled up his shirt and showed me the scars.” Then “we hung out, went for a beer.” Later, he decided to himself, “This is what I should be doing now.”

“When you’re doing documentaries, you’re in life-and-death situations. You make friends for life. It’s definitely a very different environment than what I had before, on television, in a Winnebago, eating a bacon sandwich.”

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Since then he has made over 135 documentaries and clearly prides himself on his work rate and surviving the risks involved. I have been told not to ask him about any of the Italian criminal gangs that are in Mafia and Britain because “the group is still very active.” In another episode, he’s deep in the Colombian jungle, sweating and dressed in camouflage, to witness the drug trade up close. He says that when he returned from a long day of filming there, his car was stopped by someone looking for a bribe. “I told him to fuck off. I shouldn’t have done that, but I was tired and I’m a grumpy old man.” And what was the briber’s reaction? Did he pull out a gun and shoot him? No. “He understood. We shook hands.”

In many ways, it’s a strange life to lead, traveling the world to interview some of its more unpleasant inhabitants about sex trafficking in India, the rape epidemic in South Africa, or corruption in Las Vegas. When I ask if he suffers from PTSD, he shrugs. “I did a bit of self-medication when I came back from Afghanistan” – he filmed there, following troops fighting in Helmand province, in 2007 and 2008 – “but other than that, not really.”

So maybe he’s an adrenaline junkie after all? He’s clearly very effective at what he does, and you can tell his interviewees think they’re meeting someone with a skin thick enough to put up with all that nasty stuff. So you could say this is the job he was born to do?

“Let’s put it this way,” he says, “I don’t miss the Winnebago.”

Ross Kemp: Mafia and Britain airs Tuesdays from 10th September at 9pm on Sky HISTORY. The book Ross Kemp: Mafia and Britain is released on 19th September