Ashley Blake life story: Day Two - TV star's Rise and Fall
Sep 4 2009 by Maureen Messent
With TV stardom, a healthy son and a new love, life could not have got much better for Ashley Blake. But money troubles loomed in his side-business as a bar owner, in the build-up to a nightmare party that saw him jailed. MAUREEN MESSENT talks to him.
HE’D done well for himself, young Ashley. By the time he was 21 his childhood sweetheart, Sharon, the white girl from Devon, was sharing the house he was buying in Winson Green, and his son, baby Calam, was thriving.
Most tellingly, he’d put behind him his youthful petty crime spree and landed himself jobs as an air steward with several holiday companies.
The icing on the cake was that his beloved mother, Patricia Stephenson, had quit her multiple cleaning jobs and was proving herself at work with young offenders and other youngsters.
“But I had all these dreams and hopes and wanted to be a success,” recalls Ashley.
“When a job came along as an air steward with Britannia Airways, I jumped at it.”
A defining moment came for him, he says, when he was on his first long haul to Orlando and was told by the captain to meet him by the pool in half-an-hour.
“I was there in five minutes,” he laughed. “I’d walked into the Sheraton Plaza Hotel and now I was lying poolside on a sun lounger, a strawberry daiquiri in my hand. I wondered how the hell I’d ended up here, and getting paid for it.”
This was seasonal employment only. At off-peak times he worked in Birmingham bars.
By the time he was 24, though, he knew time was ripe for a “proper job”.
As he says, there’s only so many times you can ask “who wants the duty free trolley?”.
His affability made him popular among workmates. He could put the nervous at ease.
He’d watched Nick Owen and Bob Warman fronting TV programmes and, suddenly, journalism seemed the answer.
His lack of qualifications was a stumbling block.
But he found a journalism course at Sutton College, working in bars in the evening.
“Although I’d done poor academically until then, something clicked.
“My learning gene kicked in and I really applied myself.”
