by Ollie Locke
I told her about it years later, and she said she would have kissed me back. Imagine how different things could be now? One night might have changed everything. One thing’s for certain, our storyline in Made in Chelsea would be totally different.
I decided that Binky and I were better off remaining best friends and forgot about trying to woo her when another person you’ll know very well from the show entered my life. I was working the door at Maggie’s, which is a very famous 80s club on the Fulham Road, when a gorgeous girl walked past with long dark hair and extraordinary eyeliner. I was immediately fascinated by her.
Later on that evening we were introduced and we even flirted a little. I thought she had something very special about her, something you can’t put your finger on.
I headed downstairs and about an hour later I heard a girl singing Phil Collins’ ‘Sussudio’. She had the most incredible voice; I had to know who it was. I looked across the crowded room to the small stage where, with a microphone in her hand, there stood the girl I’d been flirting with earlier in the night. I was totally mesmerised, as was everyone else in the room. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Gabriella entered my life.
She is a very well-respected pop star in her native Greece and has sold thousands of records. She was the manager’s best friend and was booked to sing that night. She held that entire room in the palm of her hand – I’ve always found power so sexy.
Gabriella stayed behind after closing with the staff for a few drinks. I’d had a long night so I got stuck into a few manly vodka pineapples. While we were casually chatting, and emboldened by the booze, I thought ‘fuck it’ and did a drunken lunge. We ended up snogging in the corner of the bar and several hours later left the club together, completely shit-faced. I thought that maybe I was in a position to have my first bonafide one-night stand. My previous one with Boho Girl turned into a full-blown relationship so it didn’t really count, and all my flatmates seemed to have them every day. It was something that I needed to get out of my system. Gabriella seemed up for having a night of fun so we hailed a cab and went back to mine.
As soon as we got in we grabbed some wine and navigated our way to my bedroom. We were lying on the bed kissing when she turned to me and said, ‘I’m really worried that this is going to end up just being a one-night stand.’ Shit.
Things progressed nicely. Dry humping and over-the-clothes groping quickly turned to actual bodily contact. I slowly slid my hand into her knickers when I suddenly felt this enormous mound of hair. In my drunken state, I started to feel quite ill; especially when the hair seemed never-ending in length. It was just so long and thick! In my head I was thinking ‘I can’t do this, I can’t do this, this is horrendous’, but how the hell was I supposed to get out of the situation? It was like some 80s rocker had decided to hibernate and die in her vagina. I honestly thought I was going to throw up.
I looked down at the foot-long vaginal mohican when I saw one of her clip-on hair extensions lingering between my fingers. It had come loose and somehow got entangled with her underwear during our dry humping session. Merkin-crisis averted!
We managed to get past the trauma of the fake hair and went on to have great sex. By the time I woke she’d already left and while I was sad that she didn’t want to stick around, I was happy that I’d had my first no-strings-attached one-night stand. I almost felt violated … in a good way. I’d been used. I felt alone and dirty. It was wonderful. It felt like I’d passed another milestone on my sexual journey.
It was my dad’s 60th birthday that day and despite being hungover, of course I had to go. I suddenly had a flashback to 4am at Maggie’s, several shots into it and me inviting Gabriella to be my date to the party. I decided to call her to check she had survived the Walk of Shame and also to make sure that it was just a bad dream that I had invited a complete stranger to meet my entire family.
But I felt so rough I couldn’t face going to the party on my own, and I knew that having her there would show my family that I could actually get a girl. I’d taken girlfriends to my dad’s birthday parties before but they had been proper, long-term girlfriends that I really liked and wanted to show off to everyone. There was only one problem: I didn’t even know Gabriella’s surname.
I stumbled around getting myself ready and meanwhile managed to persuade Barnaby, Alex and Cheska to come with me to help ease the awkwardness.
I was twitchy the whole way to the party, which was being held in the garden of Dad’s house in Hayling Island. Of course, it was obvious to everyone from the look of terror on my face that I’d slept with Gabriella the previous evening.
A very large glass of Sauvignon Blanc later, I was feeling far perkier and ended up having a great day with Gabriella, so I asked her out on a date. I wasn’t sure that she was the girl for me because my stomach didn’t flip over when I looked at her, but I liked her a lot. Maybe my feelings would grow over time?
The bottom line is, you do kind of know if you ‘like’ someone or not, but feelings can grow. I found myself charmed and intrigued by Gabriella and that was the perfect base for a relationship.
Obviously if you go on five dates and you still don’t like someone, there’s just no point. Life’s too short, so move on.
Gabriella and I went out for dinner a couple of times, and got along really well. She’d met my dad and his side of the family, so it seemed only fair that she met my mum too. Because neither of us had 9-to-5 jobs we had a lot of time to see each other, and we quickly became inseparable. We explored London, had weekends in Cornwall and spent months together with a spontaneous and carefree outlook. She is so much fun, and the sex was the best I’ve ever had. On one particularly memorable night out Gabriella and I were feeling particularly naughty while in a club on the King’s Road. I was buying a round at the bar when she put her hand down my pants and started going for it. I was drunk and very keen and decided to go with the flow, and within about 10 minutes, we had jammed the bathroom door shut and were having sex. Now I finally felt I had accomplished the basis of an adult relationship.
We promptly left the club, hailed a taxi – in which we continued to be very naughty indeed – and fell through the door of my flat in Fulham, where we continued to go at it like rabbits in the corridor. After a while I could sense that someone was in the flat watching us really intently. I turned around to see Alex sitting on the stairs, blind-drunk and smiling. He admitted to me the following day that he’d been so plastered that because of my long hair, as we fell through the front door he thought that we were a pair of magical lesbians sent by the drunken gods. It would have made his night! So he continued to watch.
That is really where it all started. We laughed a lot together and she got on well with all of my friends so she became a part of our group. We’d been together for six months when I received a phone call that would change everything.
It was October 2010 and my friend Antalya had been asked if she would be interested in taking part in a new reality show which would be screened on E4 and was focused around the real lives of people who live in Chelsea. Antalya couldn’t think of anything worse, but Alex and I decided to go for it. It would prove a welcome distraction from clubs.
The show’s producers came round to our house to film us, a couple more meetings followed, and in November I was told to wait for the email with their decision. By this point, Alex had decided against being in the show – his need and desire to be an entrepreneur was far greater than that for reality TV – but I didn’t know what I would do if they said no. It was clear to me that I couldn’t work in nightclubs forever, and the interview process had reignited my passion to be an actor. I waited anxiously for the news but I didn’t want to feel the same kind of disappointment I did when I didn’t get the role in The Inbetweeners. I was desperate for it to be a good outcome.
My father had just sold his property company, so to take my mind off everything he offered to fly me and two of my friends out to Thailand for a month’s vacation to the island whe
re he lived. I took along Gabriella and Barnaby, and every day I would leave them on Koh Phi Phi beach to go and use an internet café to check to see whether the email had arrived. On New Year’s Day 2011, it was there. I had landed a part as one of the eight main characters on Made in Chelsea.
I sat there open-mouthed, staring at the writing on the screen that could change my life forever. It was the most incredible feeling. Even though my head was telling me not to get too carried away, that it might be a small show and I could be back working in the clubs in no time, in my heart I felt it was going to be the start of something special. But even then I could never have guessed that two years later the show would be aired in numerous countries around the world, and that it would be the biggest adventure I’d ever embarked upon.
The email stated that it was strictly confidential and that I couldn’t tell anyone. Because of this and the fact that I didn’t know what was going to happen to us, I didn’t tell Gabriella for three days. It was hard to keep it to myself, but when I did tell her the news she was so proud of me and I felt really emotional. I told my dad over breakfast the following day and he was over the moon. I had to swear them both to secrecy. It felt like it was the beginning of something new and incredible.
I think they planned on getting a lot of press attention as it would compete with the already huge reality show, The Only Way is Essex. Despite being ecstatic at the news, while on holiday I realised that things between Gabriella and me were not great. We had spent too much time together. It had all become too much too soon. I knew that I had found someone who would give me everything I had ever wanted. She was kind, sweet and funny, but something just wasn’t working for me. She was almost too adoring, to the point where it began to get a bit suffocating. It sounds terrible, I know, particularly as I’d also been on the receiving end of being told I was too nice, but it was almost too easy and I got bored. It’s not that I’m not a big one for game playing, and I don’t think for a minute that you should mess people around, but if you’re in a relationship you do want to be kept on your toes. I know a couple who have been married for 45 years and every now and again the wife won’t pick up her phone when her husband rings, just to keep him interested. Gabriella was the total opposite.
I wanted to have to do some of the chasing but Gabriella gave everything.
I pushed my concerns to the back of my mind and distracted myself with the adventure that was about to start. When the Made in Chelsea bosses found out I had a girlfriend they were keen for her to appear on the show as they wanted to cover all aspects of our lives. Gabriella promptly agreed.
Rather than fill me with excitement that we’d be on this journey together, I felt slightly worried. I spoke to my mum that night and explained how I felt about her, to which she very firmly, and very wisely, said, ‘Do not hurt this girl. Do not break up with her on the show. Do it before the show starts.’
But I convinced myself that things would be OK and that this new chapter in our lives would bring us closer together. How wrong I was …
We started work on Made in Chelsea in early February 2011 and it was absolutely mind-blowing. None of us – Binky, Gabs and Cheska – had any idea what it was going to be like. Binky and Cheska were offered to appear in the show at the same time as me, which was amazing as in the past year they had become my two closest girl friends.
We thought the show might end up being similar to Shipwrecked, another E4 show, and that it would just be a one-season thing that people would watch and then forget about. We could never have predicted how popular it would become.
I soon met the other cast members, like Mark Francis, who I thought was the most ridiculous man I had ever met – in the best possible way. We got talking and soon realised that we had a friend in common: Pedro, my next-door neighbour in Cambridge, who famously had my name tattooed into his arm. I also met Fredrick for the first time and he is without a doubt one of the nicest people you can ever meet in your entire life.
I already knew quite a lot of the other cast, like Amber, Spencer, Hugo, Caggie and Millie, thanks to the Chelsea club scene. In fact, I first met Millie when she was 18 years old and was working for Richard’s magazine. I had hired her to be a make-up artist for one of the front covers and I’ve still got her original business card with ‘Camilla Mackintosh, make-up artist’ written on it.
I think we were all very wary of each other at first. We were all going to feature on the show but we didn’t know what one another was about – or who was being a dick about other people behind closed doors. It would be months before we saw the first episode, so we had no idea about who had big parts or if people were out to get us. It was quite unnerving, but in the end I was just myself. I didn’t want to play games, I just wanted to have fun, be with the girls and make people laugh.
When I look back now we’ve all changed so much since the beginning of the show. It’s only been just over two years and four seasons but we look completely different for starters. Spencer used to have a slicked-back mullet and I, of course, still had my long hair.
One thing we did all have in common was that we were terrified we were going to be set up to look like complete dicks, like a bunch of spoilt and shallow rich kids. Not that some people don’t do that well enough on their own (not mentioning any names), but we didn’t want to look like horrible arseholes because that’s just what most of the cast aren’t. I had given up my job for the show, and it would have been very hard to get another one if I looked like a complete dick.
Despite my concerns, I was incredibly excited about the first day of filming. I turned up to Raffles and was greeted by the filming crew. We were all a bit wide-eyed and I was totally clueless about what would unfold. Caggie, Millie, Hugo and Spencer all arrived together, and I remember thinking that they must have small parts as they weren’t at any of my meetings with the producers and the confirmed cast. As it turns out, what would we have done without them? In the end the first day of filming went great and Binky, Cheska and I obviously used the occasion as an excuse to go out for a drink afterwards. We dissected everything and celebrated what we hoped would be the start of something new. We had no idea then that it was to become so popular.
At first it took a little while for people to warm to the show. This meant that fame wasn’t instant for any of us, which was good because it wasn’t a massive shock to the system when we did start to get recognised. It didn’t take long for viewers to become hooked, though, once the word got out.
Watching the show back on TV was – and still is – the hardest thing in the world. We have a regular thing where we all get together on a Monday night in a club on the King’s Road and watch the programme together, while drinking lots of wine, of course.
It was weird seeing ourselves on TV that first time and we all sat there cringing at everything we said and did. Had it not been for several glasses of wine I’m not sure some of us would have been able to get through it all.
I was very nervous about how the public and press would react once MIC was unleashed, as there has never been anything positive shown about posh people, except perhaps Hugh Grant. But, on the whole, the reception was great.
There was one instance, however, that showed the nastier side of being on TV. I was on my way to Cheska’s birthday party at the Sanctum Soho Hotel, and I was walking there with Aliona Vilani from Strictly Come Dancing who was living next door to me at the time. I lent her my Union Jack jacket because she was cold and then a group of paps started taking photos of us. Out of nowhere a guy grabbed my face and tried to punch me. Not one of the paps tried to help me, they just carried on snapping. It made me realise how ridiculous this life can be. Some random guy was assaulting me and all the photographers cared about was getting the photo. I managed to push the guy off and get into a taxi, and ridiculously all I could think about once I was safe was what excellent shoes the attacker had on. If you’re going to be manhandled, you at least want the man to be smartly dressed.
Gabriella joined the show r
ight from the beginning and we were the first relationship on Made in Chelsea, but about a month into filming my doubts about us began to resurface.
She took me away skiing for my birthday, but at that point I could not envisage Gabriella and me on a romantic holiday in the Alps. So I invited Binky and Cheska along to make it more of a casual group thing. Needless to say, it did not go down well when they turned up out of the blue, intruding on Gaby’s romantic gesture.
We did have a lot of fun, though, skiing all day and eating fondue. But you always know when a relationship is going downhill when the slightest little thing annoys you. Gaby had this habit of turning around to me and saying ‘Faaaaaaaace’ whenever she wanted a kiss. I remember skiing along one day and she started doing it and I just thought ‘how annoying’. It went from being vaguely cute to incredibly irritating within a matter of weeks.
There was no way I could keep up the façade for another 10 weeks of filming. It was all going so wrong between us and I knew I needed out. Soon.
A few weeks later I was having dinner with one of my favourite MIC producers near my home. We were just having a laugh over a few bottles of wine when Gabriella called. She wanted to know when I would be finished so she could meet me, and then she insisted on picking me up from the restaurant.
When she turned up she had the most furious look on her face for absolutely no reason. She’d mistakenly believed I was having dinner with my sister and so was upset, suspicious and insecure despite the producer and me being just friends.
Gaby and I went back to her place, where I said as gently as I could, ‘I don’t want to be in this relationship with you anymore.’ We both sat there crying and weirdly decided to listen to the band Lady Antebellum on repeat.