I wouldn’t be where I am without reality TV... I just want different things now
Vicky Pattison talks to HANNAH STEPHENSON about her career aspirations, her biological clock and feeling even more loved up after lockdown
GEORDIE Shore star, I’m A Celebrity winner and Ex On The Beach contestant Vicky Pattison is aware that making her name on reality shows may be holding her back from more serious projects.
“For years now I’ve wanted to take myself to a slightly different space. I admire people who are doing investigative journalism and documentaries.
“Coming from a background like I have with reality TV, people aren’t in a rush to take a chance on me to do something different. People are under the assumption that I’m unintelligent or vapid or talentless. But I’m hard-working, polite and respectful and I’m the first person in at work and the last to leave.”
Vicky reinvented herself as a TV presenter with her own show Judge Geordie and became a panellist on ITV’S Loose Women for nine months, but agrees it’s an uphill battle to lose that reality TV tag.
“I wouldn’t be where I am without reality TV,” says the jungle queen, who holds a drama degree from Liverpool John Moores University.
“I just want different things now. I’d love to be doing Stacey Dooley-style docs. I’d love to look at issues affecting women – contraception, periods, synthetic hormones.”
She has revealed that she will be doing a documentary this year but remains tight-lipped about it. She started a podcast The Secret To... during lockdown, and in 2021 promoted body positivity in lingerie for a campaign with fashion brand Pour Moi.
Despite wanting to branch out, she hasn’t ruled out doing more reality TV.
For now, she’s pursuing the self-help path with her latest book, The Secret To Happy, in which she explores heartbreak, loss, body positivity and mental health, and offers advice based on her own experiences.
She’s been living with her partner, extowie star Ercan Ramadan, 28, for more than two years and readily admits she would like to marry him.
“I’d love to be Ercan’s wife. But what I took from lockdown is that I’d probably been going through life so fast, just wanting the next thing ticked off, like the bigger house, the next relationship, the next job. But now I realise that success is being happy, contentment. Every day we are so excited to see each other and we’ve still got things to talk about and he still makes me smile.”
At 34, she feels her biological clock ticking. “The last thing I want to tell women is that we should compare ourselves with other people’s timelines but I’m only human and I do feel the pressure, especially when I look around and see other people of similar ages to me in my industry knocking out three kids.”
She’s decided to have her eggs frozen to allow her more time to follow her dream. “I feel like most days I want to be a mother but other days I think, have I got space for that? I’m still feeling conflicted, which is what led me to the decision to freeze my eggs.
“I just don’t want to make [a] poor judgment now that would impact our future happiness. Ercan is considerably younger than me. Ultimately I still have days when I’m so not ready (for kids). There’s still a lot of growing up I have to do.
She hasn’t set herself an age limit for having children.
“I have no qualms about being a mother at 40. As long as I’m still healthy and happy and can be the best mother for my kids that I can. Didn’t Rachel Weisz have a child when she was
48? She looks wicked and they seem to be doing all right.”
Lockdown life has only strengthened her love for Ercan.
“I spent the first year-and-a-half of our relationship being a very busy, very determined woman going from a photoshoot to a fancy event, to filming. There was always more of that glam version of me.
“Then, for a year Ercan got this small boy-looking version of me who ran around in three-day-old pyjamas with her hair on top of her head and not a scrap of make-up. He still looked at me in exactly the same way as he did when I was on a red carpet. He just loves the real me.”
She is at a very different stage in her life from the one she was in during her 20s, when she had sex on TV in Geordie Shore (under a bed cover). She was in the show from 2011 to 2014 and became tabloid fodder. One of her lowest points came when she ended up in court in 2014, admitting one count of assault and one count of common assault after she threw her shoe at a reveller and a bouncer in a bar brawl. She was ordered to do 180 hours of unpaid work and pay £4,750 compensation to the victims.
In the book, she talks about having suicidal thoughts in the wake of the incident and of the support her sister Laura and a close friend provided. Therapy and life coaching have also helped her, she agrees. “I’m a different person now. I’m a lot older and a lot wiser. I’ve removed myself from situations like that. But I still hold a certain amount of guilt and remorse for what I did.” There were other dramas as she hit her 30s; splitting from her exfiancé John Noble in 2018 after pictures were published of him appearing to cosy up to a mystery woman on a night out in Dubai. “I just couldn’t take it any more and I was trying to deal with it all so publicly,” she recalls. Despite all that the fame game has thrown at her, Vicky remains grateful. “Yes, this job comes with pitfalls – everything you do is public knowledge and everyone’s going to have opinions on you, not all of them nice – but I have a charmed existence.”
I feel like most days I want to be a mother but other days I think, have I got space for that?