Charlie Cotton returned to Albert Square last night leaving viewers and Jack Branning in total shock.
The character originally disappeared from Walford back in 2015, after his marriage to Ronnie came to a sorry end and it appeared as though she and Vincent Hubbard had done away with him.
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However, it later emerged that Charlie hadn’t actually carked it, but still decide to steer clear of the world’s most dangerous and laugh-free neighbourhood. As anyone with an ounce of sense would do.
Until now, that is.
In last night’s ep, Jack Branning got himself into a right two and eight when he was mooching around the Minute Mart and managed to lose Ronnie and Charlie’s son Matthew.
Frantically he trawled the Square looking for the wee mite but to no avail.
But just as he lost hope of finding the little fella, Max told him to “calm down” and head to Dot’s house.
When he did, the door was opened not by the Square’s resident gossip, but by her grandson Charlie holding his little boy in his arms.
“I think we need to have a chat about my son, don’t you?” he said, as Jack looked on shocked.
Speaking about his return actor Declan Bennett, who plays Charlie, said that when his character initially disappeared from the show he too wasn’t sure if he had been killed off or not.
“When I left for the first time, I was like ‘am I dead, am I not dead?'”, he told the Metro. “They don’t like to divulge too much information, even to the actors.”
Declan admits he only discovered that there was still life in his character when a mate called him one night out of the blue.
“A couple of months later, a friend phoned me and said ‘you’ve just had a phone call to Roxy, you’re not dead’, so it was nice to know that he was still kicking around!”
While he was out of the show, Declan says he didn’t have time to keep up with what was going on in the Square, but then got back into it when he heard about an upcoming plot twist!
“I got wind of the storyline of Ronnie and Roxy coming to an end and I was quite intrigued so I started watching again to see how it played out and then I got this phone call out of the blue asking:’Do you want to come back? You’ve got a biological son here who we think might need his dad!'”
He added: “I’d got back into the show from watching Ronnie and Roxy’s exits and I really liked what Sean [O’Connor, producer] was doing. I was really engaged and I like his style and the long, drawn out nature.
“It was a bit of a no brainer – it’s always nice for an actor to go back and revisit a character and it’s only in the soap world that could ever happen; it’s quite a unique experience as you wouldn’t go back to a stage show and do part two!”
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Charlie”s return really hit home with the viewers, with some clearly not very attentive fans still actually believing he as dead.
“Charlie rising from the dead and that? Thought Ronnie killed him.” said one nitwit who hadn’t been paying close attention to the show, while, another added: “What’s going on omg it’s Charlie cotton and he’s got Matthew?”