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Liverpool Echo
Liverpool Echo
Entertainment
Kate Lally

Man played iconic Brookside character and nobody even knows it

A musician and TV extra has shared how he ended up playing the body buried under the patio in iconic Brookside scenes.

Number 10 Brookside Close was home to the Corkhills, but it was also the scene of what soap viewers voted one of the most dramatics storylines ever. Wife beater and child abuser Trevor Jordache, played by Bryan Murray, lay undetected under the patio for two years before his body was discovered.

Mandy Jordache and her daughter Beth buried him, with help from fellow Brookside close resident Sinbad.

READ MORE: Brookside is returning to TV screens for the first time in 20 years

Mike Woolley, now 70, played the body when it was discovered. Amid the Scouse soap's return to the screen, he spoke to the ECHO about the surreal experience, and how it came about.

Mike, from Port Sunlight, said: "I was on the same agency as Michael Starke (Sinbad) and Vince Earl (Ron Dixon), we worked in the clubs and pubs in bands. There was a Brookside dream sequence with Mandy dreaming Trevor had broken in through the back window and chased her up the stairs.

"Anyway when they watched it back, there was a hair across the screen and it needed filming again. Bryan Murray was filming away and they couldn't get him in, and I was the same height and had the same hair, and the sequence was only filmed from the back."

Mike was called in for a morning's work, where he had to break through a fake glass window before chasing Mandy actress Sandra Maitland up the stairs and into her bedroom, where she later awoke realising it had all been a nightmare.

Jimmy and Eddie unearthed the body two years after it was buried (Channel 4/Brookside)

Mike was just about to get his lunch when he was offered some more work in the afternoon.

Within hours, he was buried in a shallow grave with just his head and shoulders sticking out. And his hand had been made up with grains of rice to resemble maggots, with "manky bits" and fake nails added.

He said: "I thought they'd just film the hand coming out of the ground, but I was actually buried. And it was filmed in January so it was freezing cold. Suddenly the rest of the crew said they were taking a break for some tea and biscuits and they all walked off and left me there as a joke.

"They came back pretty quickly, though, and we all went and got some tea. I got changed and then I had to get my hand made back to normal".

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