Billy Mitchell (EastEnders) revealed in 2006 that the role was extended by "coincidence and chance": "I was offered four episodes and here I am, about 800 later. [...] Ross Kemp (Grant) said that he was leaving, and there was a gap in the Mitchell family, so they brought me back to do stuff towards his leaving. After that they offered me a year." Billy was reintroduced in 1999, making recurring appearances. He was involved in the leaving storyline of Grant Mitchell in October 1999, before returning later in the year as a regular character. When Billy was first introduced, he was depicted as
Ross Kemp on Gangs Kemp meets the people involved in bitter guerrilla fighting – including the most secretive of them all, the Sicarios; and travels to East Timor to meet the Sacred Heart and Seven Seven, two gangs in the midst of a deadly conflict. In the fourth series, Kemp travelled to the Los Angeles district of Compton, to a neighbourhood where a famously hazardous scene was filmed, in which gangland junior Matt 'Malicious' Ward misfired his gun in a rival gang's neighbourhood. Kemp travelled to Bulgaria to investigate Roma gangs and Neo-Nazi Skinheads; Belize, where the focus was cocaine trafficking; and Liverpool, where