JASON Manford would hide from loan sharks as a kid as his parents fought to get their heads above water, he has revealed.
The Curtains actor described how his mum would hide behind the couch whenever a bailiff or loan shark would turn up at the door, which would be almost weekly. “At Christmas he’d get extra shifts at the post office overnight. He’d come back, sleep for an hour and go off and do his other job."Jason added: “But they’d had a decade or so of loans. So even when they did get on their feet with two wages coming in, they could never quite get past that.
“When my dad lost his job in the NHS, he sat us down and I could see he’d been crying. He said, ‘Look, there’s going to be no Christmas presents this year’."“He was touched at my maturity. Then I said, ‘Santa buys the presents’.” “But they had three of their five kids at the time in the house, all hungry – you’re not going to ask where it comes from, are you? Crime is never far away from people who are poor because desperate people do desperate things.”"The only time I ended up with decent trainers was if my uncle picked up a pair. I remember my mum drawing on an extra white stripe to make it look like I had Adidas," he admitted.
He always had poor material.