takes on the role of a man. It is all supposed to be a joke but Sharon takes it to heart and shocks Tom when she arrives home with a ring and asks for his hand in marriage." However, in a plot twist, Tom was not killed off by the tumour; he instead died in a fire, airing in an episode that paid homage to Halloween, in October 2002. His death coincided with the exit of another character, Trevor Morgan (Alex Ferns). In the episode, Tom rushes into a house fire to save Trevor who is holding his baby and his ex-wife Little Mo Morgan (Kacey Ainsworth) hostage, but despite rescuing Mo and the baby, he and Trevor both die in an explosion. Return of Den Watts In 2003, producer Louise Berridge negotiated for Leslie Grantham to reprise the role of Sharon's father Den, 14 years after his last appearance. Part of her motive for doing so was to bring Sharon, whom she described as one of her favourite characters, "right back where she belonged, at the very heart of the show." The character Den had supposedly been killed in 1989 and a body found the following year had been identified as his, so the programme-makers needed to make certain that his return could be plausibly explained. A research team was employed to scour over past episodes of EastEnders''' to make certain that his return storyline would not have been going against anything that had been shown prior, or that could not have been "faked". In an interview with Walford Web, Berridge discussed how her researchers discovered that there were inconsistencies in the episodes that aired during 1989 and 1990, that could account for Den's death being staged. She commented, "A great deal was made in the show of Den's [signet] ring turning up [as proof that he died]—but if you watch the episode of the shooting you'll see he isn't even wearing it at the time of his supposed death. So how did it get in the canal?". Berridge's writers concocted a story whereby the body that was recovered in 1990 was misidentified as Den's; Den fled to Spain to escape the mobsters and allowed his family to believe he was dead until he was traced in 2003. Den's return aired in September 2003, with Den walking into Sharon's club "Angie's Den" (named after her parents) and uttering the