One of the reasons I didn’t think it could be Ex on the Beach was because, that show normally takes place in Marbella. THIS show was going to be somewhere far away and tropical. I didn’t know where, but all I got told was to pack my bag for a month and to bring my passport. By the time I got to the airport, I still had no idea where I was travelling, but the chaperone slipped up and said something like, ‘I’ve got my British phone, but I’ve also got my Mexican phone.’ Ha ha! At that point, I had to hand over my own phone, but I quickly messaged my mum to say, ‘I think I’m going to Mexico.’ I also had my iPod in my bag somewhere, and that had WiFi on it. When we stopped over in New York for our connecting flight, I quickly sent my mate a message on Facebook, to tell my mum where I was and that I was safe.
We finally got to Cancún and I was allowed to make a phone call home, as long as I didn’t reveal where I was. So we had this pantomime of me dialling home and saying, ‘I’ve arrived somewhere safely, but I can’t tell you where.’ My mum obviously knew already by then, but she went along with it.
When we got to the hotel, we had to be kept in hiding for a good few days. This was so me and the rest of the cast didn’t bump into each other. All the secrecy meant I had to stay in the apartment – no swimming pool, but a massive telly, so that was something. I kept begging the chaperone to tell me which show it was, but she wouldn’t say a word. After a few days, she didn’t have to. On that same massive telly, I was watching Ex on the Beach, and the opening credits were very similar to the VTs I’d filmed back home when I’d been packing my bags. It dawned on me, ‘Shit, could this be Ex on the Beach?’ These scenes looked too similar to what I’d just filmed back in Essex.
Finally, I got to the beach where I was about to go on and make my debut on this new dating show. I was allowed to have as many drinks as I wanted, so I backed tequila and Jägerbombs. Then the producers walked me round to the beach front – they said to me, ‘Do you know what show you’re on yet?’ and I said, ‘I have a feeling, but I’m not sure.’ They said, ‘Walk on, you’ll be filmed from this moment onwards,’ and as I walked round, it was the familiar Ex on the Beach bar.
I walked up, got given a coconut, and, as I stood there, I thought, ‘I’m fucked.’
One of the lads was Kirk Norcross off TOWIE, and he was really cute, but it was a bloke called Bear who initially caught my eye. He was really good-looking and we had banter, but from the very first night he was playing me off against a girl called Amy. I mean, come on, I’d left Nu Bar to get away from all of this, but now it was happening all over again – the only difference was, I was in a bloody bikini in front of a TV crew.
Then, a couple of nights after we arrived, I found myself in a strange situation at the dining-room table – I was arguing with Bear and I felt my temper boil up. For some reason, Bear accused me of liking Kirk for his money, and I just saw red. I ended up shouting and walking off, which seemed a bit dramatic even to me. I couldn’t give two shits about Bear, so why was I screaming at him? Clearly, running away from Essex wasn’t the right choice. I just brought all my baggage with me, and was taking out my hurt over The Dip on Bear.
Then Amy’s ex-boyfriend Jordan turned up, and he made things even more complicated.
During our intro videos, I’d been asked to describe my ideal man. I’d said things like ‘tall, tanned and cheeky’. Well, Jordan turned up, and, guess what? He was tall, tanned, very cheeky. He was from Cardiff, and he’d already been on another show called The Magaluf Weekender so he wasn’t nervous at all. In his introduction video, he went on about being ‘ready for something serious’, but in the villa he made it clear he wanted to party. He was a proper laugh and we just clicked.
Things got a bit more complicated when Bear kept trying it on with me. As I said, he was very good-looking, but pretty soon I made up my mind to stick with Jordan, and I still think I made the right choice.
By now, the producers had realised they could make really easy telly out of me – they just had to feed me with tequila and then watch me explode. My temper was getting worse and worse in that villa. I kept shouting at people, and THEN Jordan’s ex-girlfriend turned up.
She was really pretty with big fake tits – she’d clearly been sent in to stir up trouble between me and Jordan, and it worked. They immediately went off on a date, leaving me to sulk in the villa. When they got back, they seemed really close. He was definitely enjoying playing me off against her – probably because I’d been getting lots of attention up until that point and suddenly it was his turn, which is reasonable – so I kicked off again, right on cue. The producers did love to rile us all up. They used to say to me, ‘Go on, stir it up tonight, do your worst,’ so I would. I used to think, ‘Sod it, what do I care?’ Part of me was thinking, ‘I’m never going to see these people again,’ while the other part of me was getting genuinely drawn into the drama of it all. Plus, free Jägerbombs on tap didn’t exactly help matters. Really and truly, underneath all this anger was just a broken girl.
Despite that little bit of romantic drama, it wasn’t actually the boys who really set me off in the villa. It was a few of the girls, speaking about me behind my back. I felt like I’d done everything I could to make friends with them – lending them clothes, talking about stuff – and it had seemed all right at first. The way they behaved towards me took me all the way back to Woodbridge – it made me really paranoid and I just didn’t know how to deal with it.
After years of having a bunch of really good female friends, it brought everything back from a time when it was the opposite – all them memories of being picked on in the school corridor, and it made me lose it in the villa. I could go from nought to ten in seconds, over something really basic like food. Anyone watching the show must have thought I was off my nut to start with, but for me it was about not being respected all over again.
By now I was getting a reputation as an unpredictable psycho, based on a number of incidents that looked like I was kicking off for no reason. Well, let me tell you how one of those incidents really went down.
The producers sent most of the girls off on a salon day, basically so they could start bitching about me. The other Megan – ‘Welsh Megan’ – had been pretty quiet, but she got it in her head that I was getting above myself. She was saying that I thought it had become ‘the Megan show’, and that I needed to calm down. It was probably just her way of getting some airtime, but it did the job. Some other girls joined in, and everyone else seemed to be rising to it, instead of rising above it.
Later, at the dinner table, Bear stirred things up as usual between Welsh Megan and me, telling me they’d all been talking about me. Then she appeared beside me, telling me we had to go for a chat. She even picked up my plate like she was my schoolteacher. After being bitched about all day, and then them ganging up on me at the dinner table, I wasn’t having any of it.
‘No, no. Everyone. Fucking no,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to talk right now.’
I walked off, leaving them to more bitching, but I suddenly realised I’d left my dinner behind, and I was actually quite hungry, so I went back in.
What I didn’t realise until I came back was that the girls had thought it would be funny to eat my food. Now everybody in that villa knew about my food allergies, that I was on a special diet because I couldn’t eat any wheat or gluten. But instead of looking after me, one girl stole my food, which was ham and cheese that night. This girl – the same one who insisted on having chicken every morning for her diet, plus, if I’m honest, was struggling herself for airtime by now – took it upon herself to shovel a load of ham and cheese in her mouth at the table and start prancing around, mimicking me. I couldn’t believe it when I saw what was happening. Why would you do that when someone has an actual illness, and they physically can’t eat anything else? She was thirty years old, for goodness’ sake – she was meant to be the mature one in that villa. I tried explaining it to her and everyone else, that I couldn’t eat anything else on the table because of my allergies. I was feeling really isolated by now, but everyone just thought it was a joke.
It was like being at Woodbridge all over again, and I just couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t believe her behaviour, and I got to that point again where I couldn’t control my temper. I kicked off majorly and started shouting the place down. I called this girl a c**t, and the next thing I knew, we were face to face, threatening to beat each other up. Jordan had to get me out of the room, and I heard Vicky Pattison shouting, ‘Someone get the bird some fucking Dairylea,’ which would’ve been actually quite funny if I’d been in the mood for it. But this wasn’t the time.
People thought that it happened because I just get hangry. Don’t get me wrong, I do. But on that occasion, they were taking the mickey out of something really serious and that just felt unfair.