Sex- obsessed svengalis of Made In Chelsea left me stressed and depressed... even its theme tune sickens me
Booze, boys: Cheska lifts the lid on TV’s poshest reality show Binky and ‘ bad’
IT ISN’T immediately easy to feel sorry for Francesca ‘Cheska’ Hull. One of the original cast of Made In Chelsea, the reality TV show which portrays the vacuous but glamorous lives of a group of rich young Sloanes, she appeared to be living many young women’s dream.
A posh PR girl whose job involved shepherding celebrities in and out of exclusive nightclubs, Cheska spent four years on screen guzzling champagne, swishing her huge mane of blonde hair and tottering about on 6in Louboutins.
Aside from the ‘amaa-zing’ nights out, her central role on the show appeared to be relatively undemanding: providing a shoulder for her best friend Binky Felstead, while hunting down evidence of her boyfriends’ – plural – cheating.
Yet today, Cheska has renounced it all and looks back on her Made In Chelsea years with palpable horror.
Far from being a bit of lighthearted fun, Cheska says it was a traumatic ordeal, where the storylines played to the whims of television svengalis determined to ramp up the drama.
So stressful did it become that it affected her mental health, causing extreme anxiety and depression. At one point, she even had a stalker who threatened to kill her.
A prestigious Bafta award for the show – now on its 15th series and watched by an audience of 800,000 – only served to make the situation worse, she claims.
Relationships were meddled with or dispatched by producers to maximise the tension, and ‘accidental’ meetings organised for dramatic effect. By the time she left, she was unable to hear the theme tune without feeling a sense of panic.
‘I absolutely loved the first two years of the show,’ Cheska says.
‘It was exciting and different. But then it got darker. It was more about the drama than the comedy, at our expense. They didn’t care.
‘I found the last two years emot i onally very difficult. I was depressed, stressed and anxious.’
Today, Cheska is unrecognisable as the bouffant-haired, micro miniskirted party girl from the programme. She has exchanged the rarefied life of a reality starlet for the comparatively humdrum world of deepest Devon, where she lives a quiet life as a single mother to her four-month-old baby, Charlie. Her long hair is now a flattering auburn and she’s dressed modestly in an ankle-length blue-and-white printed dress. The impression is pure yummy mummy.
Despite reluctantly agreeing to be filmed for the show last year, she is adamant she will never go back, crediting her move to Salcombe for rebuilding her confidence.
‘One hundred per cent not,’ she says, when we meet at the Harbour Hotel in the picturesque seaside town. ‘Not if they paid me millions and millions of pounds.
‘ The best therapy was coming down here and being able to close the door on that London life.’
Yet Bangkok-born Cheska, who boarded at the prestigious St Mary’s School, Wantage, before studying fashion promotion at the University for the Creative Arts, was one of the first people to be approached for the show in 2011. She brought on board her friends Ollie Locke and Binky – now two of the show’s biggest stars.
At first the show was full of gently irreverent, slapstick debacles, including a photoshoot in a London park involving a naked Ollie.
But behind the scenes, the producers were working tirelessly to create drama, a process which became known as ‘ constructed reality’. Made In Chelsea’s ‘story supervisor’, Daran Little, also writes scripts for EastEnders.
‘The producers spoke to us on the phone for hours every week. They’d come on nights out with us,’ Cheska says. ‘They put us in situations that created drama.’
Cheska insists the show was not scripted, but added: ‘You knew the conversations you needed to have. I had to tell Binky that her boyfriend had cheated on her. People will judge you on Twitter. Obviously the messenger always gets shot.’
After the first year, though, she says it all changed. Cheska discovered that producers wanted more grit and relationship drama.
‘It won a Bafta. They had to up their game. If the producers can find a hole in a relationship they will. If there’s an ex-boyfriend in America, they’ll fly him over.
‘It’s the same with friendships. If there are two best friends and there’s a rumour it’s not going well they’ll do whatever they can to make it worse.
‘You would never have a relationship on the show that could go well. It’s like EastEnders: no one wants a happy couple, they want to see fireworks. After four years I started
‘It was exciting, different. But then it got darker’
realising what they were going to do. I would sometimes dread filming.’
Sometimes, cast members were portrayed in ways that directly contradicted t heir real l i ves. Cheska, portrayed as a perennially single Bridget Jones type, in fact had a serious boyfriend for the last two series.
‘The show knew but, because he wouldn’t go on the show, I was portrayed as single. If you told the cast anything before filming you’d be in t rouble. You’d ruin t he reaction. You wouldn’t last long if you did that.’
By far the hardest element to deal with were trolls on social media and stalkers, Cheska says. ‘I had a weird guy on Instagram and Twitter who wouldn’t stop.
‘He’d send photos of knives and threatened to kill me. The police dealt with it and Channel 4 were great, but it was horrible. You do think, why am I doing this?’
After a stint in New York, when the show went to the US, Cheska quit Made In Chelsea in 2014, but her party lifestyle continued.
‘If I wasn’t doing work for a night- club, I was out at a nightclub,’ she says. ‘Lunches tended to be a drinky thing. You’d start drinking at lunch time and be at Raffles until 5am.
‘It got to the point where seeing the same drunk people over and over again became tedious and depressing. It was not the way I wanted to lead my life.’
A year later, feeling burned out, she went to Devon for a bank holiday weekend to stay with her mum and never returned.
‘My life now is completely the opposite of what it was,’ Cheska says. ‘In London, everyone’s stressed and wears black. Here the air is cleaner and people are nicer. My relationship with my family is better because I’m with them all the time. I’m much happier, relaxed and at ease with myself. It’s a relief.’
It was here she met local chef Tom Huggett. They fell in love, moved in together and decided to try for a baby. But four months into the pregnancy she broke it off. ‘It wasn’t working,’ is all she will say. ‘I made a decision that I thought was right for me and Charlie.’
It sounds drastic, but the move mirrors her own upbringing. Her parents divorced when she was one. Her father Robin, a banker in New York, committed suicide in 2011, plunging her into a cloud of depression. It means she is determined to ensure Tom maintains a relationship with Charlie.
Yet as a single mother, she has already faced stigma, particularly at antenatal classes.
‘The midwife would say things like, “Get your husband to rub massage oil in.” Then it was about date nights and keeping your relationship alive. It makes you feel humiliated. It needs to change. Now you have sperm donors, surrogacy, adoption.
‘A lot of women worry they can’t do it alone. You can. I have.’
Such domestic concerns are a long way from her old life. Cheska hasn’t been in a club for three years. ‘I don’t miss it because what you get for free comes at a price. Even going to premieres is just going to the cinema with a bit of red carpet.
‘Now Charlie and I do baby swimming, mother and baby yoga and we’re going to start baby sign language soon. On a Sunday morning I want to go for a dog walk. I don’t even remember being up on a Sunday morning before.
‘In Chelsea you couldn’t just walk down the road in your pyjamas to get a loaf of bread. I’ve been to Spar in my slippers down here.’
Of course, Salcombe is hardly a backwater. Known as ‘Chelsea On Sea’, it is Britain’s second- most expensive seaside town after Sandbanks in Dorset.
Simon Cowell, Sir Rod Stewart and his wife Penny Lancaster have all been spotted here. Sir Michael Parkinson has a holiday home in the town while, wisely, Mary Berry sold up three years ago – the last two- bedroom waterfront apartment went for £1.5 million.
Cheska now co- owns the local boutique Amelia’s Attic with her mother. With its pricey kaftans, pearl necklaces and now – thanks to Cheska – upmarket baby clothes, it caters to the gilet-wearing yachties who inch their Range Rovers down the narrow high street i n the summer months.
It’s still most people’s idea of a glamorous life, yet she insists there i s none of t he s ame London pressures to look pulled-together and perfect.
‘If you get caught without your make-up on, it doesn’t matter.
‘In London, you felt judged,’ she says. ‘I haven’t worn high heels since I left London. Now it’s flats or wellies.’
She adds: ‘The Made In Chelsea Cheska was a bubbly party girl. The real Cheska is a happy, carefree mummy.
‘People are dying to be famous and go on these types of TV shows, but I’ m now l i ving a normal, real life.
‘I work and look after my baby. That’s much more fun than going to a premiere or walking down the Kings Road.’
‘I had a weird guy who threatened to kill me’