Larry Lamb: ‘You’ve only got one body and you better look after it’

Actor and writer Larry Lamb says he’s learned the importance of taking care of his body later in life, saying: “You’ve really got to respect the fact you’ve only got one of them, and you better look after it.”

Eight or nine years ago he underwent surgery to correct nerve damage done 20 years before by “doing up houses, building stuff, being active but not taking care of my body”, the 78-year-old says. “If you’re doing heavy lifting and carrying and all the rest of it, you better do something about the way you lift and carry. And put a protective belt on so your lower back is guarded. I didn’t do any of that.

“It’s a very slow process for the nerve system to pick up and get going the way that it then should be.”

The Gavin and Stacey star, who played Mick Shipman in the hit BBC series by James Corden and Ruth Jones, exercises every day. “I get on my bike, I swim every day, I do a bit of yoga. The buoyancy factor is enormous with water [when swimming], so your body’s not taking the strain that it is when you’re walking.

“I try and keep myself as fit and active as I possibly can, because that’s the only chance you get. I eat carefully, I don’t drink anymore, I want to live a long time.”

The actor, who only started his TV career in his late 20s, and became best known for his iconic role as Archie Mitchell in EastEnders, until the character was dramatically killed off on Christmas Day in 2009.

Being in his 70s, “you’re confronted” by the realities of health and how you’ve looked after it throughout life, he notes. “Everything takes much longer the older you get.

“You should see me in the morning when I’m trying to get out of bed like some sort of sloth,” he says, with a laugh, “wondering what part of my body is going to be aching worse today.”

Lamb, the eldest of three children, grew up in Harlow, Essex, and went to a grammar school in Edmonton, north London, on a scholarship. He’s previously opened up about a difficult childhood and the house feeling like a ‘war zone’. His parents split up when he was nine, his mum left and Lamb lived with his grandmother.

“I didn’t have particularly a good time. It had been pretty rough in the first few years that they’d got together my parents, then I’d been living with my grandmother, who was a real, an extraordinarily positive influence on my life,” he says now.

Working with Sky Glass Air TV on a new campaign with influencer Ash Holme celebrating the milestones that make us feel like adults, Lamb says buying his first TV in 1973 was “a big moment”, two years before he became an actor and was able to buy a house. Property ownership was ranked first as a rite of passage into adulthood (over marriage) by half of Brits, according to new research by Sky.

It was during his first-ever overseas acting job in 1983 that Lamb made a decision to focus on his health more – and there was another unexpected consequence. “I was running, going to the gym, I stopped drinking, and within about three of four weeks – it was really weird – all these poems just started pouring out of me.

“I was a 36-year-old man then and a lot of the poems were about my views of my memories of a little boy growing up in a troubled home.” The poems were packed up in his loft and he found them 40 years later – in his 70s.

So Lamb began to write again. “I’m writing about the same period of my life, the beginnings of it, but with maturity and another 40 years under my belt. You’re looking at these [things] in a slightly different way, deeper. Now I really understand what was going on at 19. At age at 36, I didn’t really get it.”

Years of psychotherapy have helped Lamb understand and process the impact of his childhood. “I was a child of two parents who were really, really messed up in the Second World War – I’m war damage,” he shares, the name of one of his poems.

Writing (he published his first novel All Wrapped Up in April 2025) has been a big part of his life after Gavin and Stacey – the story of a couple, one from Barry Island, Wales, and the other Billericay, Essex, and their families. “It was wonderful to be involved with Gavin and Stacey through the years, and then it came to an end and [I] felt sad, pleased, relieved. In the end it had to finish, it had to be rounded off.”

Does he see himself retiring? “I remember sitting around with an older actor, there were a bunch of us youngsters, and one of them said, ‘So what about retiring?’ He said, ‘You don’t retire as an actor – you just suddenly realise that the phone doesn’t ring anymore.

So, “There’s no point deciding you’re going to retire,” he says, with a laugh.

After three marriages, Lamb is single and living alone. “One can always be lonely. The price you pay for living alone is that you don’t always want to be on your own, but sometimes because of the way you’ve chosen to do [life] you are on your own.

“I’m certainly not isolated, I have a lot of really good friends and family and there’s never a moment where I can’t pick up the phone and talk to somebody, ever.

“I enjoy solitude when I want to be alone. I need solitude if I’m writing about stuff which I find deeply emotional. I need to be able to get right into it.”

Larry Lamb and Ash Holme star in the new campaign. For a grown-up telly, Sky Glass Air 4K TV is available from £6 a month.