Smelly, Sarah texted me yesterday (a lot of people call me this. I hope it's because it sounds like my surname, and not because I don't wash enough). It's hit the Radio Times. One of us is in trouble for being obnoxious already.
I messaged back immediately with something I'm not going to repeat here because I'll get in trouble with my mum.
It says, Sarah answered, "as one of the female candidates discovers she didn't make the final, she glumly cheers herself. And that says it all." I think that was me, she added.
I stared at my phone, shaking slightly, and then I went to the toilet to vomit. It wasn't Sarah who 'cheered herself': it was me. On a boat in Bristol, I remember shouting dryly "here's to me!" before drunkly raising a glass at the camera: attempting to acknowledge what a loser I was, and actually only making myself seem even more of one. (In the meantime, of course, Ben had not only gone through, but had unselfishly claimed that he had "done it for love". True love, apparently - the kind that exonerates you from accusations of egotism - costs over £70,000 these days.)
The problem is: I've already seen a chunk of the documentary. I see all of it on Wednesday, but I've already seen enough to know that I'm going to be running scared for the rest of my time in the UK. Despite spending the entire five week process telling the camera how little I wanted fame or notoriety, how uncomfortable the whole thing made me and how lovely everyone else was (Doug, Sarah and Sam, for instance, are now extremely close friends), the BBC have edited it down to three minutes of me hungrily fame-seeking, bitching about Hayley-the-Australian (very ineloquently: I believe I make a high pitched noise like a child, and a slapping motion with my hand), and being unceremoniously dumped by Producer Boy on TalkSport FM. My hair is ginger (goddamn hairdresser from hell), my face is shiny and spotty (new moisturiser), and my appalling clothes are falling apart and have paint all over them. I bitch, I fail to open doors properly (not metaphorically: there's a shot of me struggling at the entrance of a radio station for a good 15 seconds), I am rarely out of my pyjamas and I look like a sulky, boring cow because they kept ordering me to walk across bridges looking 'thoughtful' so I just frowned and glared instead.
In short, by 9.30pm on Thursday, I'm going to want to throw the sofa cushions at myself. God only knows what the rest of the UK is going to want to do.
The thing is: I have to put things in perspective. I told my doctor last week that I am having minor panic attacks quite frequently at the moment, and - when he asked why - I mentioned the documentary. "I think it's quite normal to panic about having your life exposed on national telly," he pointed out calmly. "I'd be more worried about you if you weren't reaching for a paper bag now and then, to be frank. It would show a lack of normal sensitivity." Nobody has died, nobody will die (apart from my ex-hairdresser), and no harm is done: I didn't have a life before the documentary aired, so there's not a lot it can do to ruin whatever I've got left.
But I still don't want it to happen. I don't want to see myself portrayed as something other than what I am; but much, much less do I want to see myself portrayed as exactly what I am. And that's what scares me the most, I think. Because who's to say that the bitching, stupid, minging, arrogant, ginger version of Holly Smale isn't the Holly Smale that the rest of the world sees anyway? Who's to say that the few minutes where I let myself down aren't what I'm defined by: aren't what I deserve to be judged by? Because - ultimately - it doesn't matter how nice I was for the rest of the time, or how humble: the documentary hasn't put anything there that wasn't there already. All my worst qualities - my strident opinions, my arrogance, my coldness, my intensity, my vanity, my cattiness - are all there: all the BBC has done is reduce me down to them. Which I can't blame them for. I'd have done exactly the same thing if I was in the editing suite as well.
So - as with everything else in life - it's a learning curve. Never let the BBC in your home. Never mouth off about another candidate or date in public, no matter how horrible she has been behind your back (for the record: she inferred that I was sleeping my way into the media, but she did it off camera) or how hot he is, and how humiliated he has made you. When a door says 'push,' don't try and pull it. Wear a proper bra, and clothes that don't make the builders laugh at you. Don't cry on film, or announce that 'nobody ever asks you out' (this is not true: I don't even know why I said it). Never allow your hairdresser to 'warm your hair up', because they'll make it orange. And try - try - to be the best version of yourself you can be.
Because, when the essence of you has been boiled down, you should - if you're a decent, worthwhile, good person - be able to watch it on television without being sick afterwards.
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