14/04/08
I found this earlier today. The daily mail took it down from their website but It was stored in my TEMP files and I wanted to put this in my blog to read another day if I wanted to.
I always liked Mark Speight. He was fun to watch, animated, stylish and seemed quite warm on the cameras. He is up there with Dave Benson Phillips and Theakston and Ball in their ‘Live and Kicking’ heyday. Not even Pat Sharpe or the bloke from run the risk were as good as Speight.
I remember seeing the billboard when he was accused of killing his girlfriend and I thought to myself that either a) I was a terrible judge of character or b) that there was a massive misunderstanding. I was glad that it was b.
Then I read that he was staying with her mother because he couldn’t face going home to the flat they shared. At night she could hear his sobbing from her room. The man was dying from a broken heart.
Well. For me, when mom rang to tell me they found his body at Paddington I became nauseous. I had followed this thing with some interest and, you know, when you know what Paddington Station looks like, and you see a face that you like and recognize and then put them both together Its pretty grim.
This is where that guy off TV died. The one who did that interview with Julian Opie and opened your eyes to Escher and simple modern art after school while I was eating my waffles and crispy pancakes. You know, gave you a little bit of inspiration. It was better viewing than Grange Hill anyway.
Well. This is an exclusive and I think its probably the saddest thing i have in my possession. It looks like the closest thing that he has to a Eulogy. His final words.
He found his girlfriend pretty much cooked to death in a scalding bath. Too high on coke and sleeping pills to realize that she was boiling herself alive. And he found her.
The day before he went missing, he found himself turning to a Journalist of all people.
Here it is.
Daily Mail
13th April 2008
My last troubling talk with Mark Speight – just before he vanished.
ELIZABETH SANDERSON
I was just leaving the hotel in Blackfriars when I heard someone calling my name.
I turned round and spotted Mark Speight, standing in the shadows and smoking a cigarette. As I walked back to meet him, he said: “Sorry, can I ask you something?”
“Yes anything”, I replied.
“Will I ever get through this?” he asked, his bright-blue eyes dull and full of despair.
It was an unusual question to ask a journalist he barely knew but then for Mark nothing is ‘normal’ any more.
Ever since he found his fiancee Natasha Collins dead in the bath of their London penthouse after she’d taken “significant” amounts of cocaine, the world had become a confusing, essentially meaningless, place.
Which is why his disappearance last week is of such concern to his family and friends.
Four days after our conversation, Mark failed to arrive for a planned meeting with Natasha’s mother Carmen in a Covent Garden coffee shop.
CCTV footage shows him boarding a Bakerloo line underground train at Queen’s Park station, North-West London. He hasn’t been seen since.
A week ago last Thursday was the first time I had met Mark Speight. I had seen him on television presenting the BBC children’s show SMart and, like everyone else, I was impressed.
He seemed much younger than his 42 years with a natural, bouncy enthusiasm for life.
And when we spoke, there were still traces of that person he had once been. He was friendly and polite and would occasionally light up at some memory of Natasha – yet each smile was tinged with an unbearable sadness.
There was no question that Mark had been utterly devastated by Natasha’s death back in January.
He had the dishevelled demeanour of an old man but the helplessness of a little boy who didn’t know where to turn next.
We met because I was doing an interview for The Mail on Sunday with Carmen. Mark accompanied her to the hotel because, as we revealed last week, he had barely left her side since his fiancee’s death.
His agents had advised him not to speak to the Press, yet there was obviously much he wanted to say. Before Carmen and I went to speak in private, the three us had coffee.
It was the day after the inquest at Westminster where a coroner had ruled that Natasha, a 31-year-old actress, had died from cocaine toxicity and immersion in hot water.
Mark had taken the stand but when asked if he wanted to add anything to the evidence, he said he did not.
That day, Mark told me he regretted the decision and said: “When I was up there I really wanted to say something – to say what an amazing girl she was but when I got up there I just couldn’t do it.
“I went dry. I just couldn’t get the words out. I wish now that I had said something.”
He was worried that people wouldn’t understand how much he had loved Natasha and was concerned that their relationship had been portrayed in a trivial way.
“I don’t think people realise,” he said. “But we were very much together. That night we had been making plans, which makes it even harder to accept she has gone. We were getting married. We were in love.”
And it was tragically apparent that the prospect of life without Natasha – or Tash as Mark always called her – was unimaginable.
Seated in the foyer of the Crowne Plaza and still bewildered by the horror of recent events, he said: “Everyone keeps saying [about the inquest] that it’s an ending, that at least it’s over; but it’s not is it?
“This is the beginning. This is it now. This is life without Tash and we’ve got to work out how to live with it.”
Given his disappearance last Monday, this is something that Mark is clearly struggling with. Two policemen who stopped the presenter in Kilburn, North West London, that afternoon said he had appeared “distracted and deep in thought”.
They offered to call him a doctor or simply someone to talk to but he declined, telling them: “I need to leave.”
He later withdrew some money from a cashpoint before boarding the Tube. His mobile phone has been switched off ever since and police believe that he may have gone to one of the places that he and Natasha used to visit.
They are now focusing their search on the Thames Valley and Dorset and admit there are grave concerns for his safety.
As one of only a few journalists to speak to Mark about Natasha’s death, I know that there were a number of points he wanted to get across.
On a scrunched-up piece of paper, he had written down some notes for Carmen’s interview that he hoped she might say on his behalf.
He wrote that Natasha was his “cheeky monkey – his soulmate and best friend rolled into one”.
He said their “motto for life was that you can’t argue with a smile” and that “she loved people and loved life”.
“I loved her for those reasons,” he wrote. “We were happy and very much in love.”
Most poignantly of all he said: “My life without Tash will never be the same. A part of me has died with her and her loss will be with me for life.”
Mark and Natasha met in 1999 when they both appeared in the BBC children’s programme, See It, Saw It.
While it was Natasha’s first acting job, Mark was already established on the circuit.
The son of art teacher Jacqueline and property developer Oliver Speight, Mark grew up in the well-to-do suburb of Tettenhall near Wolverhampton.
He had his first break when he appeared as a contestant on ITV’s Blind Date, hosted by Cilla Black.
By 1992, his talent for comic expressions landed him a role in an advert for crisps. That year he also made his West End debut in the musical Moby Dick and appeared in a video with Kylie Minogue.
He has since starred in programmes for the BBC, CITV and the Discovery Channel.
His friendship with Natasha developed into something closer in 2001 after she was in a near-fatal car accident.
She had just won a major part in the Channel 4 soap, Hollyoaks, when she was knocked down by a car in North London.
She spent six weeks in a coma and afterwards her memory was badly affected, making it difficult to learn lines.
Her career never really recovered but in retrospect the most devastating side-effects were the panic attacks and nightmares she suffered as a result.
Mark has told Carmen that Natasha turned to drugs as a release from all the flashbacks.
The inquest into Natasha’s death heard that the couple had been “partying” on the night of January 2; that they had taken cocaine and sleeping pills and hadn’t got to bed until 4am the following morning.
Mark found his fiancee in the bath when he woke up just after one o’clock that afternoon.
Tests showed her blood contained a by-product of cocaine at a level of 3.42mg per litre. Just 0.7mg per litre can be fatal, depending on an individual’s reaction to the drug.
Mark was insistent that Natasha was not an addict and he was clearly upset about the way their last evening has been portrayed.
He told me: “We weren’t “partying”. We had been to a party in Maida Vale. It was a friend of Tash’s. We hadn’t even wanted to go. We had a few drinks there. We didn’t do anything and then we came home.
“I wish I’d never told the police now. They kept saying at the inquest that we were “partying” and it just wasn’t like that.”
Mark has always remained vague on the exact details of that evening and had told Carmen that he couldn’t remember what happened.
That night outside the hotel I told him that I thought Natasha’s mother deserved to know more.
He seemed hesitant – not, I felt, because of the drugs involved but because those memories were all he had left.
It was, after all, the last night he and Natasha would ever spend together.
In the end he agreed and said: “It was just the two of us. We were talking about the future. We were planning for our wedding and writing poems for it.
“We were looking forward. We were a couple. I feel as though the way it has been reported it’s as if this was just some kind of relationship that wasn’t very important.
“But it wasn’t like that. We were getting married. We were everything to each other.”
Mark hasn’t been back to the flat since Natasha’s death and told me: “I just can’t do it. I can’t go there. I’ll never go there. Eventually I’ll sell it.”
“I haven’t really thought about that yet but there’s no way I could ever go back. It’s so hard. Tash was my life.
“At home I have to be strong for Carmen but it’s just so hard. I miss her so much. She was everything to me. Nothing really matters any more, now she’s gone.”
And then he said: “I want to tell you something about Tash.”
Just weeks before her death Mark had played Buttons in Cinderella at the Watersmeet theatre in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire.
Natasha worked there too, selling T-shirts. Mark knew how hard it must have been for her not to be on stage but he was so proud as he recalled a night in the theatre before the cast had arrived.
“The theatre was empty,” he said. “I lifted her into the pit where the band played and she started playing the drums. [Natasha was a talented drummer who had performed at the Albert Hall.]
“Bit by bit people started coming in and everyone was getting into the music.
“Someone said, “Oh, the band’s in early tonight.” And then Natasha stood up. They said, “Oh, it’s not the band, it’s the T-shirt girl.”
“Tash kind of gave them a look and a click of her fingers as if to say, “Take that, see, I’m not just the girl who sells the T-shirts. I’m me and I’m worth more than that.”
“And I lifted her out of the pit and I was so proud of her. Because she wasn’t just the T-shirt girl, she was Natasha Collins.”
And with that Mark dissolved into tears, into the type of hard, racking sobs that come only with utter despair.
There are those who will always blame Mark for what happened that night – although none more so than himself.
True, Natasha and Mark did not stop to consider the danger of taking drugs but her death was not Mark’s fault.
Carmen herself admitted that her daughter was her own woman and that she would never have been forced into doing something she didn’t want to do.
Judging from the man I met that evening, Mark is a gentle, loving individual who truly cares.
And that, of course, is why everyone is so worried about him.
There has already been tragedy enough in the lives of Mark and Natasha and all those that love them. Please don’t let there be one more.
———————————————————————————————————-
And thats it. It was prophesied. If you look at this thing a little deeper, it was obvious that he was going to take his life.
Why did he go to a journalist of all people? Why was he staying with her parents and not his own? It is strikingly obvious that he was alone, and wanted to be alone, but when he says:
“This is life without Tash and WE’VE got to work out how to live with it.”
I don’t think he means WE in the sense of him, his family and friends, I think he is referring to himself and his deceased partner. There was no way to live with it.
Even the journalist could sense the despair. His career in ruins, always going to be the guy who coked his young girlfriend up and killed her. He had to make his statement to the mass media and crawl away into some corner of this heinous city and allow it to swallow him whole.
I think why this gets me, is because I always saw something of myself in him. A jolly guy, likes art, has a sense of humor, smiles alot and then the other side of him, losing himself in the lonely city for days on end without talking to anyone. I do it with solace, but in his condition, I couldn’t imagine anything darker.
The brighter the sun shines upon you.
The darker the shadow lurks behind your back.
