stormed out of the phone box, turned around and slapped me clean across the face. I was in total shock, but at the same time I rather enjoyed it. I had never seen anyone be slapped before, or been on the receiving end of one. It was the stuff of movies, like a glamorous 80s film with me in the role of the handsome phone-hassling hunk.
All other poor attempts at seduction were soon forgotten the moment I first saw Jemima Hoare (I’ve always pitied her name. Her teenage school years must have been a fucking pain in the ass).
Everyone else paled into insignificance. After lots of long looks, fluttering eyelashes and love notes across the classroom (all from me), I finally persuaded her to become my girlfriend. Yes, at the tender age of 10, I had found ‘The One’.
I wanted everyone to know that we were ‘going out’ with each other and that I was in a very serious, grown-up relationship. As a result I insisted that we kissed every time we saw each other so that other people knew we were both off the market and that Hoare was mine.
I don’t think she was particularly interested in me if I’m being honest. I think she mainly liked me because I was quite the rollerblader. But I also wanted her to like me for my dazzling looks and sparkling personality, neither of which I was blessed with at the time. I had half a centre-parting and half a bowl haircut, no family money, and I was weirdly obsessed with goldfish. Quite the catch, I was!
As soon as school finished I used to put my blades on and go outside the design technology block to the big open car park with my friends and we’d spend as long as we possibly could blading. Jemima always used to come and watch me and I am very happy to admit that I showed off massively to impress her.
We only ‘went out’ for about three weeks, but it seemed like forever back then. We broke up following an argument after I mistakenly snapped her favourite pencil. It had a troll on the top and everything so I think she felt she was left with no choice but to dump me. I was devastated, and humiliated. Heartbreak number three.
Most of the other pupils in my year had brothers and sisters who were older, so we were taking our lead from them and snogging anyone we could. I was on the rebound as a snoggingly active 10-year-old. We used to go to the local woods to run around and play kiss chase and anything else that gave us an excuse to kiss each other. I remember our teachers warning us to be careful because local yobs may be lurking in the woods. Yes, that’s how posh my school was. But I was more scared about ‘our’ girls falling for those ‘yobs’ than being beaten up by them.
There was a lot of integration between the girls and boys at my school. I wasn’t sporty and I wasn’t wealthy like some of my dorm mates. All in all, I didn’t feel like I had a lot going for me. I was also a big crier and used to get upset a lot. My only saving grace was that I wasn’t anywhere near as bad as Paul Flynn when it came to the tears. He literally cried at everything. Even if he was late for a class he’d be sobbing in the hallway. I looked like Vin Diesel in comparison. For that reason, I will always be grateful to him.
Even though I didn’t realise it at the time, I was in quite a bad place overall. I was worried about my mum, I missed my dad, I was desperate to fit in and, shit, did I have big ears! I didn’t feel like I properly belonged anywhere, and on several occasions I’d hide myself away in the toilets.
Because I wasn’t much of a looker and was very insecure I was an easy target for bullies. It wasn’t until I was about 16 that I discovered that being funny could make me more popular. I had no idea that if you made people laugh they would like you more. It may be part of the reason why I love comedy so much now. A lot of comedians have admitted they were bullied at school and so they used comedy as a way to deal with it or escape from the bullies.
I looked so young and prepubescent that I actually wanted spots so I would seem more grown up. I’ll never forget being in Boots with my sister. I was buying Clearasil to try and seem mature, and just to embarrass me in front of the woman on the cash desk Amelia shouted, ‘You don’t even need it. You don’t even get spots.’ My mum turned around and said, ‘It’s preventative, darling.’ Brilliant. I had the perfect excuse to hand over my money and trot back to boarding school with my badge of hormonal honour.
Although we bickered a lot, my amazing sister kind of saved me at that school. She ran the school tuck shop, so that made me a little bit more popular than I otherwise would have been. I had an allowance of £5 a week, which was a lot of money in those days, and I was allowed to put anything I bought from the tuck shop on the school bill. That was the dream.
If I wanted to impress a girl I would get an entire box of sweets and flash them around. Like bankers buying bottles of vodka in London night clubs, you may look like a bit of a pretentious twat, but it gets the ladies running. They may not have fancied me, but I could lure them over with a bag of Space Invaders. Or, if it was summer, an ice-pop. The ice-pop was considered the king of sweets. You couldn’t get much better.
I’m probably making boarding school sound slightly dreadful, but it wasn’t all that bad. I would definitely send my kids to that very school because I discovered so much about life. When you’re stuck in a dorm with an eclectic mix of kids you find out so much about people. You have the cool kid, the nerdy kid, the brainy kid, the goth kid (Richard Dinan – yes, seriously). You see things from all angles and it’s such a learning curve.
Amelia and I were always arguing as children. We fought like cat and dog and love-hated each other in the way siblings often do. It was probably only a couple of years ago that we properly started getting on as grown ups, and now we’re like friends as well as brother and sister.
After several months of worrying non-stop about my mum, things took a massive upturn when she landed a job by complete fluke. Mum was still working for Max FM when she got scouted by the BBC. At the time, she was talking about chlamydia and sexual diseases on a midnight show listened to by about three university students, yet she managed to get spotted by a man called Chris Van Schaick. It turned out he was the head of the BBC in Hampshire, and later that week he gave her a job as a presenter on BBC Radio Solent, where she stayed for the next 12 years.
After that, everything changed. There was no more delivering videos or late nights spent at the bottom of a Martini bottle. We moved house to a lovely place in the centre of Southampton and we started a new chapter in our life.
My first celebrity crush, which started when I was eight, was Denise van Outen, who very slowly became my dream girl. My friend’s mum worked for Channel 4 and she invited us to go along to the filming of The Big Breakfast. I fell in love with Denise the moment I met her. I remember her giving me a friendly wink, and I totally decided that she was the one. I grinned all the way home and I used to scour my mum’s magazines for pictures of her, which I would tear out and plaster all over my bedroom walls.
By the time I was 11 my obsession had properly kicked in – probably along with my hormones. I used to sign RDA – meaning Respect Denise Always – after my name every single time I wrote it. Perhaps Ollie Locke RDA still adorns the toilet walls and classroom tables at my old school? I remember being genuinely upset when she got engaged to Jay Kay because I was convinced that she would love me if she got to know me. I almost threw a party when the engagement was called off, and it made me fall for her even harder.
Now, the awful thing is, I’ve since got to know her and bump into her every few months at parties around London, where we double-cheek kiss and I try not to say anything stupid. And recently, at an Elton John AIDS Foundation benefit, to my horror I was sat next to Jay Kay. I certainly did not tell
