Gemma Collins was walking down Brentwood high street in Essex when a total stranger shouted from his van: “You fat cunt.” As she says: “That’s not normal, is it?” Only, for her, it is. Just this Wednesday, she was in Sainsbury’s when two middle-aged male contractors working in the store approached to say they had just seen her car being stolen. “Oh my God, oh my God,” she panicked, beginning to shake. “Ha, ha!” they sneered. “Only joking.”
Yet, in the very same week, Collins’s online social media ubiquity reached such a peak that “Gemma Collins, queen of memes, owns the internet” became a news story reported across the British press, even by the BBC. Elaborately inventive memes featuring the reality TV star have been flooding news feeds for weeks, their creator’s identity unknown but their comic charm infusing Twitter and Facebook with an affectionate delight not typically associated with these platforms.
It is six years since the former used-car saleswoman joined the cast of The Only Way Is Essex, a wildly popular and disconcertingly strange ITV reality soap opera, in which real people from Essex play themselves responding to scenarios and plotlines dreamed up by its producers. They wear designer clothes, flirt and squabble, holiday in Marbella and worship materialism. Set against an ultra-bling backdrop of McMansions, beauty salons and champagne pool parties, Towie has been described as Britain’s answer to US reality series The Hills.
Collins wanted to be rich and famous ever since she was a child, the daughter of a self-made, working-class Dagenham couple who moved out to Essex and enrolled her in the Sylvia Young Theatre School, “the best education money could buy”. Her 20s were a slightly bumpy disappointment of wide-boy boyfriends, Romford nightclubs and a job with BMW. Bombshell blond, gobby and gregarious, when interviewed for a role on Towie and asked to define her life goals, Collins’s answer was “a Clive Christian kitchen”. “What’s that?” the producer asked. “You don’t know what a Clive Christian kitchen is?” she gasped. “Google it, mate, the perfume is 400 quid.”
Since joining Towie, Collins has been a Celebrity Big Brother housemate, an I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! contestant, and a regular contributor to This Morning, Loose Women and Celebrity Juice. She has her own plus-size fashion line and boutique, and has appeared in reality shows from Sugar Free Farm to Splash! She has a designer vagina, inch-long false eyelashes, a weakness for malapropisms, and a canny understanding of what is expected of her. Fluent in cleverly “dumb blonde” shtick, she greets me with a big hug and says: “I’m well excited about doing this: this is such a posh newspaper, isn’t it?”
She barely draws breath throughout the interview, veering from one digression to another, intently engaged and apparently altogether unfiltered. She is one of the most compelling women I have ever met. Consistently contradictory, very funny, hugely likable, never boring, she might be authentically inauthentic or the other way around; it’s impossible to tell. The 36-year-old has arrived at a version of fame that might have puzzled even Andy Warhol, and the hour we spend together in ITV’s studios could provide a cultural studies undergraduate with enough material for an entire dissertation. It’s very difficult to imagine tiring of her indefatigable good cheer, and by the time we part, I feel both electrified and sad. Her story reads like a modern day morality tale about the perils of getting what one wished for.
“I don’t dislike being famous,” she says, “but there have been moments when you think: ‘Is this really worth it?’ Sometimes you go through that stage where you’re almost like selling your soul. People want all from you, absolutely everything. They want it from you. And everyone’s got an opinion about you.”
The public, she explains, imagine “you come into all of this, and you live a luxury lifestyle, and sit around on your arse all day, but nothing could be further from the truth”. She has come straight from the Loose Women studios, will shoot a commercial for Carphone Warehouse afterwards until 9pm, appear on stage at G-A-Y in Soho at 1am, head up to Liverpool a few hours later to promote the Curve fashion festival, and race back to spend the weekend filming Towie.
How does she choose which work to accept? “Well I don’t really turn anything down. I’ve kind of got this panic in me, like, shit, I wouldn’t want to look back and think I missed opportunities, so I do everything really. I feel guilty if I have a day off, cos you never know when this is going to end.”
Although the tabloids, she says, exaggerate her wealth, in her best years she can earn more than a million. In the past, the imperative of specific luxuries had landed her in serious debt, but she never doubted that they would bring her happiness. “When I was younger I wanted it – I wanted it all.” So has getting all that stuff made her happy?
“No!” Her eyes widen. “It’s not that it doesn’t make you happy, but it becomes meaningless. Like, it was my ultimate dream to have a white Range Rover. But then the Range Rover lifestyle just become normal to me. So after the first Range Rover I went on to have another four or five, and the last Range Rover I had, I didn’t get the buzz when I picked it up. It meant nothing. Not in a flash way. I just thought, this is bullshit, this materialism is actually not what life’s about.”
What about all the people who watch Towie because they want that material lifestyle the show promotes? “Well, I think it’s a shame.”
Collins still loves Towie and is anxious not to sound ungrateful, but her ambition now is to buy a modest house in the country and keep chickens. “I’d like a bit more of a simple life now. Yeah, I really would.” Does it feel like a chore sometimes to keep up the red-carpet glamour? “Oh, it’s exhausting!” she says. “I mean, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of glam, but do you know what? I’m not bothered about getting a reservation in the latest restaurant.It’s really weird, cos I never thought I would say it. But at the same time it’s also part of what I do. It’s my job.”
But people think reality TV is real; we’re meant to be watching genuine lifestyles. “After six years of doing it, the weird thing on Towie is that we can’t explain to people that we’re famous. We’re doing a show where we have to act like normal people. So I can’t say on that show: ‘I was on Loose Women yesterday.’” Do the blurred lines between fact and fiction confuse the boundaries in her own reality? She looks surprised that I would ask. “Oh God, yeah.”
When Collins first became famous, it never occurred to her that her figure would become the focus of so much attention, and hostility. “No! I didn’t think anything of it, I just thought I was a normal girl. When I look back to when I was first on Towie, I wasn’t overweight. I wasn’t thin, but I probably had about a stone and a half to lose. I was just a size 16. But I’ll be honest with you, I’m now the biggest I’ve ever been. I’ve always been on a diet, but at the moment I’m a size 22/24.”
Does she feel beautiful? She considers the question carefully. “Um, not really. I probably felt more beautiful before I went on TV. ‘Cos I get so much criticism now. I don’t hate on myself, but I do think my weight has become such a major talking point that people just need to get over it. It’s almost like the more they talk about it, the fatter I get, because it stresses me out. I would love to lose weight, for my health. But it would take me time, I would have to step out of what I’m doing, and I don’t know how long it’s going to last, so what do I do?”
Collins has struggled with her weight throughout adulthood, but had to stop going to the gym after people kept posting photos of her “captioned: ‘Oh look at this fat bitch on the treadmill’.” She shrugs philosophically. “I see it all over social media. Even if I go power-walking down the road, people shout out abuse at me.” She smiles ruefully. “It does piss me off, cos I came on TV as I was, so why do you all want to change me?You liked me in the beginning. If I lost weight, would you like me even more? That’s kind of shallow, isn’t it?”
Public ridicule and criticism reached its peak in 2014 when she quit I’m A Celebrity after just three days. “It was a dream job, I was the first Towie girl to get the jungle.” But the night before her departure for Australia, the police were called to her flat by her neighbour; she says her then boyfriend beat her “nearly to death” – an allegation that he has denied. The pain and shock forced her to pull out of the show a few days later. “Not because I was hungry,” she wants to be clear. The couple briefly reunited last Christmas, when he showed up at her flat saying he was homeless, but a few days later he left her again. He’s firmly in her past now, but she puts the relationship down to “everyone saying so much bad at me and about me. And I think that wore me down, and I think that’s why I let myself get into it.”
Collins’s whole face lights up when we talk about “these meme things”, which she mispronounces, disingenuously I suspect, “mem-ays” or “mems”. “They’re great!” What does she put their popularity down to? “Well I don’t know! What the bloody hell’s going on there? But I’m the only girl on Towie not to have had [cosmetic] work done, and I think people can resignate [sic] with me a bit. I feel like it’s a bit of validation that I should have had a long time ago.” She has no idea who is creating them, “but I want to give them a party, because it’s amazing what they’ve done. I just think now maybe people are going to ease off me, and the universe is going to give me a break. I really suffered from anxiety a little while ago, and I even took tablets, because there have been days when I think I can’t do this any more.”
She looks worried for a moment. She doesn’t want people to think she is complaining. “I don’t hate my life, I’m not sitting here going I don’t want to be famous. But it’s come at a price, hasn’t it? It has come at a price. I just want to do my job, be entertaining and get paid like any normal person, but people think they own you. It’s like, you know, in the old-fashioned times, bear-baiting? That’s what it’s like.” An idea strikes her. “You know what they should really film? A day in the life of a reality star. Then you would see it.”
The Only Way Is Marbs begins on Sunday at 10pm on ITVBe
