He was 12 when his mother, aged just 39, died from alcohol-related illnesses, and his criminal behaviour escalated. He ran away from care homes dozens of times, sleeping in cars, sheds, squats, and committing relatively petty crimes to survive. "They put me into care for not going to school, but once I was in care I never went to school ever again," he says. Perhaps it was inevitable he would end up in the care system. It was more comfortable out there than it was in that shithole of a house." He started "smoking puff" when he was seven, and by 10 he was sniffing cocaine and passing painkillers off as ecstasy tablets at rave parties. When she was drunk, I could just run on the streets. He recounts how, as a six-year-old, he did "bob-a-job, a Saturday job, washing cars, even penny for the guy, anything to get money for booze for my mother. Once, my mother put a hot iron on my dad's back when he was asleep and he almost jumped out of the window. "They fought constantly," he says, "I mean with bottles, knives, a tin-opener, anything they could get their hands on, when they were drunk. His mother was Glaswegian his father a seaman from Liverpool. He was born in the East End of London in 1978 and brought up in Canning Town with his four siblings. It would be hard to imagine anyone living the way Kelly did before. I can't imagine going back to the way I lived before," he says. He smiles a lot as we chat and looks much fitter and healthier than he did on TV.
"I never knew life could be this good," he says when we meet in Anchor House, a former seafarer's mission that serves the needs of homeless people in Canning Town, east London.
For the first time since he was 10 years old, and after a long stint in a rehabilitation clinic in Devon, Kelly is clear of drugs.
Bad boys bakery series#
Now, a year after the series ended, the fast-talking cockney's life has taken a dramatic change in direction.
Bad boys bakery professional#
Before taking part in last year's surprise-hit reality TV programme, Gordon Behind Bars, in which Ramsay set up a professional bakery in the bowels of London's Brixton prison, Kelly, 34, had spent a total of 16 years in a variety of jails around the country serving time for burglary, drug dealing, stealing from heavy goods vehicles and innumerable other felonious activities. "I 'm a work in progress," says Anthony Kelly, former career criminal, long-term drug abuser and one-time star trainee in TV chef Gordon Ramsay's Bad Boys' Bakery.