EastEnders legend and Celebrity Traitors star Ross Kemp has called for more support to be given to the families of people serving in the military.
At the launch of this year’s Poppy Appeal, he told GB News: “Well, this is the 20th year. I took over eight years ago from the late Dame Barbara Windsor. Most of my family have served in our armed forces.
“This year, particularly, we’re looking at families, looking at the support they need. It’s not just service personnel and our veterans. It’s also the families because they sort of serve as well.
“People often ask me, ‘It will be 20 years next year from when I first went out to Afghanistan,’ and I was talking to a couple of my friends who are actually serving soldiers while I was filming them, and we were saying, what was the hardest thing about Afghanistan? Was it being shot at? Was it getting diarrhoea and vomiting? Was it the heat, the fear?
“We both agreed that the hardest thing was coming home and looking into the eyes of the mothers who had lost their sons.
“I think it’s really poignant that we think about families when we buy a poppy, not just those that have served, our veterans.”
On the appeal, he said: “20 years ago it was literally 50 people, and you know what? I think there’ll be 250,000 people out today collecting.
“But you know what? The need is greater now than it probably ever has been, and we live in a more dangerous world, I would suggest.
“As I travel the world and go and look at some other interesting places, having been to the Ukraine, having been to Iraq and Syria and Libya, we live in a more dangerous place now than we have for many years, and when things go wrong, we call on our armed forces.
“We call on service personnel that we see in uniform but we rarely get to meet. This is a great opportunity. If you’re travelling around London today, there’ll be bands playing in various train stations.
“Go up and say hello. Go up and say thank you, maybe. We should be celebrating the fact that we have such brilliant armed forces.”
