SHE began her career as a child star singing You’ve Got To Have Heart – and today TV veteran Sherrie Hewson still longs to follow her own.
The 69-year-old star, whose career has taken in Coronation Street, Crossroads, Emmerdale and Benidorm, as well as Loose Women and Celebrity Big Brother, is hoping for one last romantic hurrah in her personal life.
Sherrie’s 28-year marriage to businessman Ken Boyd came crashing down in 2001 after he admitted cheating, and they later divorced.
But now, in an exclusive chat with HOAR, she says: “If they found a sort of young Robert Redford or a Clint Eastwood, I’d be there.”
The actress appeared in funeral parlour period sitcom In Loving Memory in the Eighties, played dizzy supermarket worker Maureen Webster in Corrie in the Nineties, was in Crossroads and Emmerdale in the Noughties, then played Solana hotel manager Joyce Temple-Savage in Benidorm from 2012 until 2018.
She adds: “I was asked to do Celebrity First Dates — that one filmed in a hotel.”
But despite her many on-screen romances, she could not face people watching her try to bag a man in real life.
She says: “Oh God, I’d be so embarrassed. Could you imagine saying, ‘No, I don’t like him?’”
She says of the Channel 4 reality show: “At the time, everyone said, ‘Do it, you’ll be in a nice hotel for five days.’ But then I’d have to talk to them. If they asked again, now, I don’t know if I would do it or not.”
Sherrie — who was a panellist on Loose Women for 14 years until 2016, and in 2015 starred in Celebrity Big Brother — has talked openly about struggling to have relationships since the heartbreak of her divorce.
She last mentioned a mystery man she was dating in 2018, which sadly did not work out.
Sherrie now fears she may be too familiar with being alone. She says: “It would be very difficult to have a romance because I’ve been on my own for so long.
“I just don’t know who I would meet and who would put up with me. I don’t think I’d stand any-one being in the same house as me. Maybe it’s far too late for somebody like me.”
While she loves keeping her home just as she wants it, living alone has been hard — especially during lockdown, and with her brother, Brett Hutchinson, dying in April aged 71 from a brain tumour.
She says: “I wasn’t allowed to go to the hospital when he was suddenly taken very ill and went downhill.
“I spoke to him the week before he died, and I did go to his funeral. But it’s been traumatic and I couldn’t see my family, my daughter or my grandchildren who I live for.”
Her brother’s death put Sherrie on a downward spiral, resulting in her seeking comfort in booze, while her only child Keeley tried to support her.
Sherrie says: “When we first started lockdown, I began to drink too much wine, but then I thought to myself, ‘You’ve got to stop.’ So I stopped, for six weeks.
“Sometimes, now, I do have a glass of wine but really I’ve kind of knocked it on the head.
“I thought, ‘I’m becoming fatter than I am already from eating, and it’s a depressant.’
“I was drinking because of my brother’s death. I thought, ‘If you can disappear, you can forget.’
“The problem is, you wake up the next morning and have to remember, and you’ve also got a headache so feel five times worse.”
But despite the dark places she has been in lately, Sherrie has a new passion in the form of her YouTube chat show Wonderbirds with pals Harriet Thorpe, Dee Anderson and Debbie Arnold.
The ladies have clocked up more than two million views in just 12 weeks and had guests including TV fashion guru Gok Wan, Doctor Who writer Russell T Davies, funnyman Paul O’Grady and Sun Page 3 legend Linda Lusardi.
The idea for the show was cooked up during Zoom chats in lockdown. Sherrie says: “Debbie came up with it.
“We were just having a laugh, and we said, ‘Why don’t we do this online’ because at that time TV studios had shut down.
“We have no restrictions so can talk about anything, including product placement and all the things you can’t do on TV. We’re free to say anything we want. We started as a four and then guests started to come on, too.”
Sherrie is often gobsmacked by the big names who want to appear, and despite running three episodes a week they have a list of celebrities waiting their turn.
But the Wonderbirds do not just host famous faces. They have made a point of inviting ordinary people who are battling difficult situations, such as a woman trying to rebuild her life after a diagnosis of terminal cancer.
Sherrie says the show aims to be positive and full of laughter, because there are other people to do “issue-led” programmes — and it is no surprise it is such a success because these days Sherrie seems an almost constant presence on our screens.
During lockdown, she has appeared in re-runs of Five Go Caravanning and Celebrity Antiques Road Trip, among other programmes.
She jokes: “I’ve been in TV for at least 100 years. My mum used to say to me, ‘Oh my God, Sherrie, you’re the one actress who is always on the TV.’
“I’d reply, ‘Oh God, Mum, don’t say you’re fed up with seeing me on the telly.’ She’d say, ‘Maybe, but you’re never off it.’
“Thank God, I’m very lucky with the work I get and the fact I’m on telly all the time, so that’s brilliant.”
But what she would most like to do is to return to Corrie as Maureen — who was married four times, to Frank Naylor, then Reg Holdsworth in 1994, Fred Elliott in 1997 and Bill Webster in 1998.
She says: “Maureen went to Germany. I think she’s still in Germany. Bill, my screen husband, owned the garage and he’s died so I must own half of it. I’d love to go back to Corrie. It was my favourite.
“You never know, and my mate Tony Maudsley from Benidorm [who plays Kenneth du Beke] is there now. So there could be Kenneth and Joyce in Weatherfield, which would be funny.”
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