Wednesday, 3 April 2013

Made in Chelsea's Ollie Locke, interview for Laid in Chelsea - Telegraph.co.uk

Take the time he meets Rachel Stevens of S Club 7 fame: "After several large glasses of wine I was convinced she'd be interested in a 17-year-old virgin with little or no prospects..." he writes. "What. A. Dick."

At least he cuts to the chase. The mistake that many celebrity "authors" make is to believe that the public are interested in their lives per se when of course all anybody really wants to hear about is the scandal, the heartbreak and the gory details. Essentially they take themselves too seriously, a charge that can't be levelled at Locke, who refers to himself as "an idiot" throughout the interview and writes candidly about his disastrous record between the sheets.

"I'm happy to give away as much as I can about my sex life because I think that's what people want to know and it's comedy. I don't mind talking about that," he explains. "I just really wanted to make a book that everyone will love."

Of course he does. But this book, which is beyond ridiculous at times, is never going to be for everyone...

"So then I decided it was time to cut off the hair," he writes. "This was difficult for me. Was I really going to lose those locks that I'd spent the past 10 years growing? I told the show that I wanted to cut it and they nearly had a seizure."

There will be no shortage of people ready to snigger at this sort of banal prose – the same people who derided Made in Chelsea when it first aired – but the programme and Locke have proved irritatingly compelling. And this book looks set to be equally successful.

Locke insists that he wrote it himself. Was it cathartic to revisit old loves and to relive the traumas again?

"It was very, very hard and a lot of the time it involved a lot of wine. I needed to be in the right mindset in order to think about ex-girlfriends. There was plenty of depressing music. It's sort of like method acting for writing… without sounding like an idiot," he concludes, recognising how laughable he sounds. Other celebrities would do well to copy his self-awareness.

He's also not about to get hung up on privacy, that other bizarre complaint of those seeking publicity. "I've given so much to Made in Chelsea and now I've written this book so I wouldn't really have a right to complain about privacy. You can avoid the press as much as you want, but going to nightclubs is part of what we do [for the show]," he says.

That press interest is likely to intensify with news that he is in a relationship with another of the Made in Chelsea cast, Ashley James. For anyone who's not up to speed, she's the one that Francis started seeing when he realised that he couldn't be with Sophia who was dating Proudlock, but then Sophia realised that actually she preferred Francis, who was dating Ashley, and so dumped Proudlock at just the same moment that Francis ended it with Ashley. Oh and now Ashley is with Ollie. Obvs. He assures me that their relationship will be played out in full during the next series, which threatens to be as absurd as ever.

"I don't think people are expecting what they're about to see. Not with me, but things have gone to a new level in a very serious way," he warns.

Speaking of warnings, Locke says that he has another book on the way – "a mixture between Peter Pan and Stardust but set in a different realm". More champagne please.

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