Amy Childs was born in Brentwood. All the gels [girls], well, the majority of gels, we all go out like this. Once upon a time the Essex girl was merely the set-up to a joke. A stereotypical confection of high heels, popup cleavage, bottle-blonde hair and spray tan by the gallon, she was notoriously dim and morally loose in equal measure.
Shine a torch into her ear. Why do Essex girls wear knickers? Named by the bookies as a likely finalist in the series she is the contestant the two single young men in the Big Brother house were most anxious to meet, and she is now being talked up as a new version of Katie Price, the pneumatic businesswoman formerly known as Jordan. Amy was the standoutstar to emerge from The Only Way Is Essex, the deliberately confusing half-way house between drama and documentary that beat Downton Abbey, Miranda and Sherlock to a Bafta to the horror of TV professionals at the awards.
Made by the producers of Hollyoaks it featured a cast of young people from the brash, moneyed enclaves of Chigwell, Buckhurst Hill and Brentwood and focused chiefly on their romantic interplay. Her idea of taking care of herself involveshaving her hair blowdried three times aweek, her eyebrows tattooed and her eyelashes tinted. In the decade and a half that reality TV has been a staple of British cultural life, two distinct types of young women have prospered from it.
They are either hard-bodied, sharp-elbowed and determined to profit from their surgically improved assets did I mention Jordan? But TV loves to mash the genres and it is now in the process of creating a star in Amy who has both of those qualities at the same time. Collagen and silicone-enhanced when she was still in her teens the privately educated Amy combines blow-up-doll fantasy with a disarming lack of sophistication in any other respect. On being told the prime minister was no longer Tony Blair, she guessed his replacement was George Bush.
She was full of admiration for her friend who actually watched the news and reminded her that Bush was American. What I am interested in is who made fake tan. Dinosaurs, not really. She had already tried to break into reality TV via the usual auditioning process so when Lime Pictures spread the word that it was looking for an attractive young cast who conformed to all the stereotypes of Essex man and woman, Amy and her friends were obvious candidates.
