How Richie's back on top

Shane Richie is slumped on a sofa in a hospitality room at the BBC. He looks all shiny in his Teflon suit and trademark slicked-back dark hair.

He gives me a flash of a smile when I walk in. "'Ello, darlin'," he says. He then pats the seat next to him, and rubs my knee affectionately. (Women, apparently, go weak at the gills for his chirpy cockney tones and touchy-feely bonhomie.)

Then he goes back to watching television with his entourage, which includes Goz, a friend for more than 20 years and his PA; his manager, Phil Dale; and his girlfriend, Christie Goddard.

He is here to rehearse for Children in Need. His manager tells me that the programme is a big deal for 40-year-old Shane. "He's going to be up on stage with Mis-Teeq and Sting." Richie perks up. "Sting's 'ere, is 'e? He's great. I'm gonna meet 'im and ask 'im to go on to a titty show with me."

Goddard, who looks much younger than her 25 years and is very pretty in a chocolatebox type of way, starts giggling. "Only joking," says Richie. "I'm always larkin' around, ain't I Christie?" Christie nods. "He's a right one," she says. "I first met him when he was in Jack and the Beanstalk in Wimbledon. I was in Cinderella in Croydon.

"A friend took me to meet him and there he was all in green tights and a little green suit." "You thought, 'Cor' darlin', didn't you?" says Richie. "I'm not sure 'Cor'," says Goddard, "I thought you looked like fun."

Shane Richie's career, with its ups and downs, has always been based on fun. Currently he's on an up, appearing in EastEnders as Alfie Moon, the landlord of the Queen Vic. It's a role that has just won him the title of "Sexiest Male" at the British Soap Awards.

But he hasn't always been this well-loved. When he was "Mr Saturday Night", as he called himself back in the early Nineties, he was on mainstream television incessantly, with a run of game shows. Some people found his whole who-luvs-youdarlinme-that's-who routine profoundly irritating.

But others found him so endearing that he ended up with his own show, The Shane Richie Experience, and a stint in an advert where he set housewives the Daz Challenge. Still, he was very popular until the late Nineties, when everything went wrong.

What was it, exactly? Richie groans. "I messed it all up, really," he says. Part of the problem, as he admits in his autobiography, From Rags to Richie, is that his nine-year marriage to Coleen Nolan, the youngest of the Nolan sisters, broke up in 1999. "I was presenting a show called Love Me Do about fidelity and I was having an affair. I looked like a hypocrite," he says.

The tabloids broke the story of how Richie was carrying on with 25-year-old Claire Tyler, a dancer in Grease, the show in which he'd starred as Danny Zuko. "I'm not proud of that," says Richie. "I've gone through everything in the book to set that record straight.

"Anyway, it wasn't just about my marriage break-up. Television changed. That whole Seaside Special brand of entertaining, which was very much the type of thing I did, started to look a bit jaded. People wanted reality TV, not gags. One day a BBC producer took me to lunch at The Ivy and I thought, 'Wey hey, here's another contract', and he told me I was out on me ear.

"My whole thing was entertainment. I've done all that - the donkey derby, the bingo calling. That's what I used to do when I worked at Pontins as a bluecoat with Goz. I was only 15 but I lied and said I was 18. We learned our trade there. Then I became a TV presenter but I always saw myself as something different. I always thought I was an actor."

It is this belief that finally dragged him back from the wilderness. "I'd got to the stage when I was being turned down by Channel Five," he says. "They got a former Big Brother person to present a game show and not me. I knew I was down on me luck then."

Somehow, a year or so ago, Richie's manager got him a meeting with the EastEnders people. They later rang to offer him the part of Moon, the sweet, kind, nan-obsessed, wears-his-heart-on-his-sleeve man who is having an on-off relationship with Kat.

At present it looks as though the couple are about to wed but, as per usual, it's a willtheywon't-they cliffhanger. He's been married before and can't remember whether his nan finalised the paperwork for the divorce when he was carted off to jail. Will the ex-wife appear, reveal they are still lawfully man and wife, and ruin the nuptials?

"Can't say," says Richie. However, Moon has been the making of him. Even the Queen runs her dining arrangements around watching the soap.

"The part was written for me," he says. "I find that incredible." What's even more incredible is that now everyone loves him. I wonder, though, if Richie is getting a touch blasé now he's back in the land of the luvvies. Although he tries to grin a bit and give me some of his cockney patter, essentially he's not really concentrating. He keeps trying to watch the television. I also think that, now he's done the book and he's on the up, maybe he's slightly rewriting history.

For example, when I ask him what it was like to have taken such a mighty fall from grace, he replies: "Fall from grace?" He, himself, has said in the past that he was treated by those in the industry as a social embarrassment. "Why would I think that?" he says. "It wasn't that bad. I got offered things but I didn't want to do them." What types of things? "I'm a Celebrity ... that type of thing."

He says being asked to sing for Children in Need has been the icing on the cake. He considered doing Leader of the Pack but ended up choosing the Wham! song I'm Your Man.

Now he's back on a roll, is he terrified it will all disappear again? "No," he says. "Once you've lost everything and you've come back again, you lose fear." But if he's so confident, why is he surrounded by so many people? Phil, his manager, is the human equivalent of a velvety-tongued Rottweiler. He is obviously there to keep Richie on track.

At some point, when I ask Richie about the revelations in his biography that he essentially shagged anything that moved when he was a bluecoat, Phil jumps in and says: "That's too personal."

What do you mean, too personal? It's Richie himself who writes about gang-bangs and mother-and-daughter romps. It seems that life as a bluecoat was one long shagathon as woman after woman made herself available for the youthful Richie.

"I was naïve," he says. "I was young! I mean, who wouldn't when surrounded by all that was on offer? I did the book to set the record straight because the press always gets things wrong. Coleen and I have always been friends. She made a tremendous effort for us to be amicable. She's in showbiz. She knows what happens. I was away a lot and ..."

According to past interviews with Nolan, her husband found it very hard to accept the end of their marriage, even though it was he who had strayed. In the book, Richie writes about how he raged against everybody. "It was all their fault, not mine," he says. Matters came to a head when Nolan announced she was
to remarry. "I found it hard that Coleen had moved on," he says.

So he went to the States and hired a Harley-Davidson and drove from coast to coast. At some point, he collapsed, cried and finally accepted responsibility for his actions. But then he had to come home and face his demons - his drinking problem, his overeating, his pregnant, remarried former wife ...

It's been a bit of a ride, really, hasn't it? I ask him. "I'm lucky I met Christie," he says. He was very much in debt when he met her. He'd piled his money into a film called Shoreditch, about a nightclub owner (himself) who falls in love with a singer, played by Joely Richardson.

"It was only supposed to cost £120k," says Richie, "but it ended up running into over half a million. I wasn't supposed to pay for it all but I got shafted." The upshot is that he had to sell all his cars - a Rolls, a Porsche, a BMW - and remortgage his house in Beaconsfield, then borrow off friends. "I'm still getting out of debt," he says, "but there's not that much further to go." The film previewed at Cannes to a good reception so it may make its money back.

I ask him how he feels about money. He comes from a pretty poor background. His parents - Lily and Paddy - came over from Ireland. "My mum's a cleaner," says Richie. "That's her trade. She found a job looking after a battered-women's shelter in Harlesden. We all shared the top floor. Me, my mum and dad and my younger brother. When we were little we slept in the drawers.

"My dad was a welder and a joiner and he wanted me to learn a trade. When I came home with make-up on because I'd been in the school play or helping out at the local drama club he'd get pretty angry."

Everything's worked out well, though, surely? "It has," he says. His sons, Shane Jr, 14, and Jake, 11, are on their way down from Blackpool, where they live with their mother and her new husband, to see Richie doing Children in Need. "They're great kids," he says. "The one thing I tell them is always treat girls like princesses. It'll get 'em everywhere in life."

"Where did it get you?" Goddard asks cheekily. "Lots of bad places," says Richie. "But then it got me you." They both smile a bit and then slump down again to watch the TV.

I'm Your Man, Shane Richie's single for Children in Need, has just been released. From Rags to Richie; The Story So Far (£17.99) is published by Contender Books.

The film Shoreditch is being released tomorrow.