Ex-stuntman who co-ordinated Leeds soap Emmerdale's famous air disaster releases cruise crime book

Stuart, who has just released his latest book, had previously been a stuntman himself, working on some of the biggest films of the 1980s and went on to spend more than 25 years working with the Leeds-based soap.

Growing up in London, he always had his eye on a career in showbusiness.

“In the 60s, I was a young kid who was passionately in love with pirate radio ships, not unlike everybody who grew up in the 60s,” he says.

Stuart spent his evenings listening to the likes of Tony Blackburn present on Radio Luxembourg, and it was his dream to do the same - even teaching himself electronics and building himself a radio studio at home aged 14.

Later, after a stint at Radio One, Metro Radio in Newcastle and Radio Orwell in Ipswich when Steve Wright departed, in the early 1980s he got a job in television, acting as a disc jockey in a show called Radio Phoenix.

He had become an actor “by default”, but he knew it wasn’t his calling. “Two of the casting directors who were around at the time, big casting directors, said: ‘Look, you should take the route to go into big movies. Become a stunt man and you’ll work in the biggest films. You'll be working in top Hollywood stuff straight away’. And they weren't wrong. They gave me great advice and I worked on Superman, Batman, three Bond films, smaller English films like Who Dares Wins with Lewis Collins, had a fantastic career and got to the top within a few years, becoming a stunt co-ordinator.”

Stuart, 69, who is married to actress Jean Heard, worked on the James Bond films Octopussy, Never Say Never Again and For Your Eyes Only.

His “big Bond moment,” he says, was during the first of those films. “There was one particular fight in it where I fought Mary Stävin, who was then Miss World and going out with George Best, and we have a big screen close-up, the pair of us, where she hits me over the head and takes me out.”

His last job as a stunt performer was in James Cameron’s Aliens in 1986.

“I was the Queen Alien. It was built around my body and Malcolm Weaver’s, there were two of us inside the Queen Alien back to back.”

Stuart – who is father to actress Laura Aikman (who played Debbie in Not Going Out) and Luke, formerly and actor and now businessman - went on to become a stunt coordinator and started working with Emmerdale in the mid to late 1980s.

“They decided they wanted to make Emmerdale big,” says Stuart, who lives in north London but still has a “bolthole” in Leeds. “At the time, it was a little soap but they had ambitions to turn it into a big drama, and what they called an ‘event drama’,” he adds.

“So we started with the plane crash. And the idea with the plane crash was to effectively get rid of the old village because we were working up in Esholt (in Bradford) in a street that wasn't big enough to support us being there every day of the week. So by having the plane crash, we could move to what was then the new Emmerdale village in Harewood. And we would then have a train crash, we would have a tractor turn over, we'd have a lorry turn over inside the village. All of these huge events drove Emmerdale for so many years, so they just kept me on retainer and I stayed with the show for 26 years, on and off.”

As well as working on shows such as Yorkshire Television’s Stay Lucky, starring Dennis Waterman, and Mrs Brown’s Boys, Stuart has worked behind the camera, too, directing the likes of Status Quo film Bula Quo! and Freight, which was set in Leeds.

He adds: “The weird thing about this industry for me is that I get more people coming up to ask questions, (and) are more excited to know how I got Mrs Brown to fall off a Christmas tree.”

However, Stuart’s career halted in 2014 when he was involved in a bad accident on the set of the television drama Strike Back.

“I was blown up,” he says, matter-of-factly. An explosion had been much bigger than expected and he was the closest to it. His injuries required brain surgery in 2020, but during the intervening period of recovery he turned to writing.

During his days on Emmerdale, the press team asked to go on cruise ships to talk about the plane crash episode. Years later, in recovery, his therapist suggested that to engage with an industry he could no longer participate in, he return to speak on the ships, which have taken him all over the world.

“Most people would be on the deck in the sun - I wasn't allowed to do that, my skin wouldn't have taken it, I’d been very badly burnt – so I was in the lounge and then that's where I started writing.”

His surroundings inspired the stories themselves and the latest release is a revisited version of Cruise Ship Heist, the first of six stories in his Cruise Ship Crime Investigators (CSCI) series.

He describes the series, which introduces readers to retired Commander Kieron Phillips, as being a bit like “Miami Vice meets CSI”.

Although he says a project idea “tinkled my imagination” recently, Stuart’s not too interested in going on film sets these days.

"I'm much happier writing and creating at the initial level at the moment.”

Cruise Ship Heist is out now.