Sex on TV? Grandma may have skipped that part...
Educated at Fettes, she dated Prince Harry and worked for Diana’s landmine charity. Then she became the unlikely star of television’s tackiest show...
JUST 20 miles from the Macedonian border, near a small Greek town named Polykastro, sits the Nea Kavala relocation camp. This sprawling collection of tents is one of the biggest in Greece, a dusty, temporary city housing more than 1,000 refugees from Iraq and Syria. And it is, perhaps, the last place you’d expect to spot two British reality TV stars.
Yet Camilla Thurlow, the Love Island star, looked right at home at Nea Kavala when she travelled there last month with her boyfriend, Calvin Klein model and fellow Love Island contestant Jamie Jewitt. Wearing a Choose Love T-shirt from charity Help Refugees and with her hair tied up in an artfully messy bun, Miss Thurlow beamed as she and Jewitt prepared food, helped distribute water and spent time playing with refugee children.
While her fellow Love Island competitors were being photographed falling out of London nightclubs and posing in provocative swimwear for downmarket tabloids, it seemed 28-year-old Miss Thurlow was taking things in a rather different direction. As one fan wrote on her Instagram page: ‘Respect for not selling whitening toothpaste and protein shakes’.
Quite. Then again, she was never going to be your average reality TV contestant. Indeed the privately educated ordinance disposal expert and ex-girlfriend of Prince Harry (of which more later) never really seemed like she should have been on Love Island in the first place.
It is a show where romping beneath the sheets is encouraged, men wax their chests on a daily basis and the conversation among the girls vacillates between which boy is the ‘fittest’ to what type of hair extensions last longest.
Given that Miss Thurlow has a First from Loughborough University and spent 18 months working in Cambodia with landmine charity the HALO trust, she might have seemed more suited to University Challenge than Love Island. Indeed, an interview shortly before she appeared on the programme suggested she wasn’t entirely sure why she had applied. ‘I think a lot of people will be surprised this is something I am doing and in a way I am surprised,’ she said.
‘But I am that type of person that my friends don’t know if I am coming or going. I am extreme – I want to push myself out of my comfort zone.’
Love Island is, in essence, a dating show, a sort of updated version of Blind Date crossed with Big Brother. There is plenty of smut, a fair amount of sex and a £50,000 prize for the winners. Set in a villa in Majorca, the contestants move into the house, packing little more than a few bikinis and a couple of pairs of swimming shorts.
ONCE there, they compete for each other’s sexual attention and frequently couple up, under pressure from the programme makers who send them on dates or engineer situations to get them alone. Couples who have sex on camera are less likely to be booted out by the public – who vote constantly on their fates – than those who keep their kaftans on. After the show, most former contestants enjoy a few months of tabloid attention and a procession of free nights out before vanishing back into perma-tanned obscurity.
It has become compulsory summer viewing for the 18 to 25-year-old bracket, as eagerly anticipated by the demographic as Strictly Come Dancing is by older generations. This year’s show brought ITV2 the highest viewing figures in its history, with 2.43million tuning in to watch the final. Indeed, it is now more popular than Big Brother, once the titan of reality TV shows, whose viewing figures have slumped since its move to Channel 5 several years ago.
Such is Love Island’s popularity, ITV2 is even considering launching a second, winter edition of the show, airing in January, while there have also been rumours of spin-offs, including one for gay contestants.
Miss Thurlow’s appearance on the programme was something of a revelation for its millions of teenage fans. Quietly composed, fiendishly intelligent and absolutely stunning in a tiny bikini, many viewers flocked to social media to praise her demure attitude and her articulacy as she waxed lyrical about the refugee situation and listed her favourite authors to bamboozled fellow contestants.
Many viewers were also astonished at her reticence, and in the first 48 hours of the show a debate began over whether she was ‘frigid’ or ‘boring’ because she hadn’t yet hooked up with anyone.
Initially she fell for bad boy Jonny Mitchell, yet despite sharing a bed (although not having sex) with him and going on a number of intimate dates, he dumped her for another girl. Miss Thurlow was left bereft and weeping, and her devastation made her even more of a fan favourite.
‘For me it was all real,’ she said upon emerging from the villa. ‘Jonny was never part of the game in my eyes and the feelings that I had, it took me a long time to allow myself to feel that way again and so it’s always sad once something ends like that.’ When she met Jewitt, a dapper model with a strong jaw and a cheeky grin who came on to the show several weeks in, she was smitten, with the two even exchanging ‘I love yous’ despite having just met.
But Miss Thurlow also shocked fans when she and Jewitt had sex in full view of the cameras. Even though they weren’t alone – at least two other couples did exactly the same during the course of the show – many were surprised that the well-spoken young Scottish woman had stooped so low.
Indeed, it’s all a long way from her jolly hockey sticks childhood, growing up in a comfortable middle-class home near Dumfries. She attended Fettes, the private Edinburgh school that is also alma mater to Tony Blair and Tilda Swinton, where she gained four As at AS level and three As at A Level, was awarded Outstanding Sportswoman of the year and represented Scotland in the Under-19 World Lacrosse Championships in Canada.
But while much of her early life sounds as though it could have fallen from the pages of an Enid Blyton novel, she also had something of a wild side, which asserted itself while at university. There she studied sport and exercise but also took the time to enter a Miss Earth beauty pageant, where she was crowned ‘Miss Edinburgh’.
After university, she took a job with the HALO Trust, the landmine charity made famous by Princess Diana, where she worked in humanitarian explosive ordinance disposal and spent much of her time abroad, with long stints in countries including Cambodia, Mozambique and Afghanistan. The nature of the job led to some reckless nights out and a lack of any proper relationship with a member of the opposite sex.
SHE said: ‘I was having these short stints at home. I’d come back for a couple of weeks so you cram six months’ worth of catching up into one night, so you’ve got six girls having cocktails, going out dancing afterwards.’
She is believed to have met Prince Harry at Tonteria, a nightclub owned by the Prince’s best friend, Guy Pelly, in the summer of 2014, and the two went sailing together in St Tropez with a gang of Harry’s friends, a mark of how much he trusted her.
The Prince was not long out of his relationship with Cressida Bonas and royal watchers wondered if Miss Thurlow was merely a rebound, or something more serious. However, the relationship foundered when she said she wasn’t ready to settle down. ‘I was
in a place where I knew exactly what I wanted to do workwise,’ she said.
‘It sounds awful. I was going through a selfish moment and I knew what I wanted to achieve, so everything was about that. I didn’t want to give that up.’
It was a change of heart on that stance that prompted her to apply for Love Island this summer. ‘I am getting to the age where my friends are settling down and starting to have really serious boyfriends and I got left behind, which is fine – but it would be lovely to meet someone,’ she said before the programme started. ‘I know this isn’t the conventional way of finding love but I am not a conventional kind of person.’
Perhaps that is why, emerging to a media maelstrom in August after she and Jewitt took second place on the show, just missing out on the £50,000 prize, she was somewhat nonchalant about having sex on television. ‘I’m only human,’ she said in a post-show interview. ‘Things were moving forward with Jamie as they would do in the real world. My grandma may have skipped that episode, though.’
Grandma aside, her family seem to have taken Jewitt to their hearts and have welcomed him at their sprawling home near Dumfries, where Miss Thurlow’s father Robert works as a vet. Pictures of Miss Thurlow at Jewitt’s family home have appeared on his social media.
Which brings us back to that trip in Greece, much of which was documented on the pair’s social media accounts. They spent time at three refugee camps, including one which is home to survivors from the Yazidi population, where they sat in on an English lesson. They posted constantly on photo-sharing site Instagram while away, both managing to look stylish yet understated as they cooked, played with children and posed with each other. Indeed in just a few shots, the glamorous pair made spending a week working in a Greek refugee camp look as cool, hip and aspirational as a night out at a London nightclub. ‘You are such an inspirational person and my role model,’ wrote one starry-eyed fan on Miss Thurlow’s Instagram. ‘When I’m older, I want to be as kind and beautiful as you,’ wrote another. Even Jewitt, an Essex boy who seems more of a beach holiday in Ibiza type, appeared to take the trip in his stride. ‘I have never had such a rewarding experience,’ he wrote on Instagram. ‘Keep an eye out for mine and Cam’s short documentary coming post trip.’
AS yet, no documentary has been forthcoming, and there have been rumours of a possible split (something guessed at by their fans after the pair took a twoweek break from posting pictures of each other on social media).
Requests to Miss Thurlow’s agent for an interview – intriguingly she is represented by John Noel, the agency that represents major TV names such as Dermot O’Leary and Melanie Sykes – were met with a crisp response that she wasn’t ‘doing any more press at present’.
However, the pair have since posted new pictures, including one cuddled up on their way to a John Legend concert last Tuesday. Jamilla, as their fans like to call them, would appear to be intact.
What Miss Thurlow will eventually do is a mystery. There have been rumours that she is ‘working on a TV show’ and she continues to post pictures of herself in the field with the HALO Trust, obviously keen to earn the charity some worthwhile publicity.
However while fans have praised her humanitarian stance, it should also perhaps be noted that last week she signed a £500,000 deal with beauty retailer Look Fantastic, a whopping amount of money for a relative unknown.
‘Camilla has been really selective with which projects she commits too as she wants to make a real mark with what she does next,’ a source remarked at the time. ‘Unlike the other Love Island girls who rushed into fast fashion deals, Camilla has set her sights high.’
No doubt. She may have made her name by having sex on TV but she appears to be taking the classy route from now on.