Tamzin Outhwaite once put all her Christmas cards into a prop postbox on the set of ‘EastEnders’ because she thought it was real.
The 47-year-old actress is set to return to Albert Square as Melanie Owen a whopping 16 years after she left in 2002, and if nothing else she’ll have a better idea of where to post her mail after a disastrous attempt to post her Christmas cards in 1998 left the letters trapped in a fake postbox.
She recalled: "I was telling some of the youngsters in the cast what I did when I first joined. I joined in like August, and that Christmas we were really busy, I was on set 12 or 14 hours a day sometimes.
"I took all my Christmas cards into work and they all had stamps on, some were going to Germany, some were going to America, some were going to Spain. I took them all and I thought, ‘Oh I’ll kill two birds with one stone and I’ll go down and film this scene outside on the lot, and I’ll pop all my Christmas cards in the letter box.’
"So I did, I put them all in the postbox, and then I asked one of the prop guys and I said ‘How often do they collect from there?’ And he looked at me like ‘What do you mean?’ I was like ‘The postbox. How often do you think? Is it twice a day, once a day, or is it just like once a week?’ And he just went ‘It’s not real’."
Tamzin was left unable to retrieve her letters after the blunder, and although she made the mistake two decades ago, she believes the lost mail is still inside the closed up box.
Speaking on ‘This Morning’ on Thursday (18.01.18), she said: "I couldn’t get them out. I was like ‘Is there anyway we can open that?’ There’s not even a thing on the back, what are you going do? Smash it down to get your Christmas cards out? They’re still in there! There must be some kind of piece of machinery that could go in and I could see what else is in there. Probably just loads of cans and stuff."
Tamzin Outhwaite’s letterbox blunder
