A drama out of a crisis; FOR SIMONE LAHBIB, THE STAR OF LONDON BRIDGE, ART IS UNCOMFORTABLY MIRRORING LIFE .

Sunday Mirror
(London, England)

February 4, 1996

Very neat, very Nineties. Bang on episode one of London Bridge, an upcoming 26-part TV drama, a young woman escapes to London and ballcracking independence - and finds herself pursued by a stalker.

Contrived? Not really. For one thing, the storyline was plotted, filmed and wrapped before the Madonna and Princess Royal stalkers made the news. For another, the young, chic actress who plays this young, chic victim has survived an assault of her own.

A real one, that is - in an early-hours London street last summer. "I was walking to a friend's and became aware there was somebody behind me," says Simone Lahbib, the serial's femme fatale.

Draped glamor-ously over suitably urban scaffolding for the photographer, she disentangles herself, comes back to ground and continues in a clear voice softened by her Scottish accent. "I made the mistake of looking back - I'd hoped that he would cross the road, but I think that's when he decided to follow me. He followed me to the front door and grabbed at my clothes, saying, 'I want sex, I want sex', and pulled my skirt up to my waist.

"I was struggling and managed to ring the doorbell which made him back off. He just walked away smiling." The police turned up at 8am, by which time the would-be rapist had made his strolling getaway and Simone's statement was wasted.

When Simone Lahbib turns into Mary O'Connor, principal character of London Bridge, her stalker should quickly become a staple fixture of TV viewing and late-night phone-ins.

The series is described alternatively as a "yuppie soap" (if you want to send the producers into apoplexy) and a "budget drama serial" that has been snapped up by most regional TV companies. Carlton's London Bridge starts the week after next and hopes are high - justifiably so, as the series is more engaging than either of its tags imply.

This is despite the fact that many of its writers and stars are new(ish) to TV. Simone Lahbib is 30 and pulled London Bridge at her first casting after moving from Scotland to London last summer. She speaks so calmly of the assault and its impact that one suspects more than a few passing similarities between herself and Ms O'Connor. "She's very ballsy," murmurs the actress of her on-screen counterpart.

Both actress and character were brought up in Stirling - Mary O'Connor in the sort of area where nobody works but the police. Mary moves to London, discovers chic, wears it, finds herself a matching career in publishing, and saves up for her first flat in a converted Thameside millhouse. No messing.

How unfortunate, then, that the day she moves in she finds a young woman being bodybagged on the riverbank, a murder enquiry cloying around her unidentified neighbours, and - in her own dream flat - telephone calls from a hissing stranger, which begin and end with: "I know where you are".

The stalking reaches a painful climax in episode 10. Simone played the storyline with intense emotional reference to her own experience that night on her friend's doorstep. "There were a lot of things the assault raised for me," she says. Fear came first, then the loss of trust, then (unexpectedly) guilt. Seeking solace from friends, Simone came to realize how comparitively banal her experience had been.

"I've three friends who have been raped; one by a relative during her childhood, another by a colleague," she confides. "Another was by a flatmate. Afterwards, while she was moving out, she had to stay at the flat a couple of nights thinking this man was away. She put the wardrobe against the door but heard someone trying the handle in the middle of the night.

"A few months later at a party, still traumatized, she met a very supportive group of women, and one by one they all had a story to tell; either assault or rape or some kind of abuse."

Simone is aware that, in this Age of the Stalker, celebrity increases vulnerability. "I heard Anna Friel (Brookside) had a lot of problems with strange and worrying letters, and felt very unsupported by the TV company," she says, frowning. Simone, who is single and shares a flat in north London with a friend, nutures her privacy.

Neither her difficulties, nor Mary's, ended with sexual harassment. Bullying at work fills another chunk of Mary O'Connor's diary. In Simone's case the culprit was a theatre manager when she was in panto. "He harassed me from day one. He verbally abused me and chased me with raised fists. I was on the verge of ringing my agent and saying, 'Get me out of this job'." The bully apologized - but not before Simone had consulted Equity and was warned that the union had an encyclopaedia of complaints against the man.

There, says Simone, end the similarities with Mary. "I'm much more protected than her. I've got a better support system and am more loved. She is lonely; she has left a life behind."

Simone is the eldest of five, their French father a distinguished chef whose unusual surname was a slip of the pen on the day her Algerian grandfather, the son of a sheikh, was signing up for the French Foreign Legion. "His name was Hahbib Maddani, and when filling out his papers the Hahbib became Lahbib, which became the name on my birth certificate."

Simone suspects that the dramatic gene came from her mother, an artist and poet. The poseur, she laughs, has always been in her. "When I was six at primary school races everyone was in line for 'On your marks, get set, go'. My family have got a photograph with streaks of children running, and I'm just stood there smiling for the camera. I didn't even start."

WHO'S WHO IN LONDON BRIDGE

Everything happens at the Millhouse, a converted warehouse "on the Thames below London Bridge" (the studio is actually in Bow, east London, on a lesser waterway). The restaurant, called SE1, is the characters' "common room" - that soapy essential in which TV neighbours, unlike real ones, congregate for intimate, bitchy conversation.

Above SE1 are four mock-up flats housing most of the nine main characters - additional neighbours were sacrificed so that the pitiful amounts of available dosh (pounds 40,000 per 30-minute episode; an eighth of the cost of mainstream drama) could be spent putting ceilings on the sets, thus preventing the walls collapsing with every theatrical door slam. That left those nine characters:

Nick Kemp, an Italian/ Cockney chef, spends his days cooking and his nights playing Monopoly - with real money.

. . . to the disapproval of his pregnant wife Isobel, an accountant who dreams of raising their child in countrified middle-classdom, beyond the reach of Snoop Doggy Dogg and airborne pollutants.

Nick's sensible if sharp-tongued sister Liz manages the restaurant with the help of her barman son Jed, a half-caste of (initially) unknown paternity conceived in her wild groupie youth. Behind the SE1 scenes, Jed swots for his Knowledge test so he can win his cabby's licence and, with it, independence from the Kemps. He is obliged to break out in lots of sweats before the credits have rolled on episode one, as his ultra-secretive relationship with the person washed up on the riverbank reveals him as a classic schizo murderer - or perhaps just your average bashful 23-year-old.

In a flat not far away lurks Ravi, an Asian lawyer whose traumatic paedophile case is destroying his libido.

It little helps that Ravi's girlfriend, Sam, is a right-on, if tactless, GP who relentlessly diagnoses impotence.

Ravi is also stuck with Ant, the flatmate from Loaded: cue lots of morning scenes featuring bathroom bachelor squalor and damp cornflakes.

Then there's Tim, Simone's boss and former flatmate. Good-looking, good suits, money - too good to be true?

 

 

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