20

Pretty much as soon as I joined the show, I realised the other girls were never going to take to me. Chloe’s group were the new bunch and they were already being picked on, even before I got there. Can you guess what I’m going to say? Yep, you got it… it was indeed just like bloody Woodbridge all over again, where we were the new girls at school that no one liked. We were younger than them, I had a TV background so they probably thought I was up myself, and Chloe was my best mate. Easy targets.

Let’s be clear, Girl Band existed way before TOWIE. There was me, Maddie, Amber, Chloe and, later on, Courtney. We were a tight group and we never let anybody get in the way of our friendship. If someone had drama, it was all our drama.

So when I came on TOWIE and the girls had their drama with the other girls, my instant reaction was to back them up, but when shit hit the fan for me, they just weren’t up for fighting my battles too. Looking back, I think Chloe and Courtney constantly wanted to fit in better with the others, even if that meant losing their best friend. The whole episode really opened my eyes.

So within a couple of months of joining the show, I felt pretty isolated. I had Pete, but every girl needs her girlfriends. Unfortunately, mine were more worried about fitting in with the rest of the cast, when really what should have mattered was our twenty-year friendship and what that had meant to us during all those years. Instead, it was clear some people wanted me gone, not just from the lunch hall, but from TOWIE completely.

From then on, I have to say, the fun times I had on TOWIE were pretty limited. Every day just got really hard with all the agg and tension between everyone. Chloe admitted it was hard to be friends with the other girls as well as me, and I used to say to her, ‘I’ve been your friend for twenty years. They’re using you to get to me.’ But she didn’t want to hear it – she felt pulled between us, between me and those girls who’d known her five minutes.

I tried to sort it out with Chloe behind the scenes, either phoning or texting her – not going to lie, I did send her some harsh messages, but that’s coming from someone really hurt about losing their best friend since childhood – but what I kept finding was that, if I messaged her about something, she’d tell the producers, and, the next thing I knew, it was another storyline on the show. I wanted to keep some important stuff away from it, but it seemed like Girl Band had other ideas, and the producers obviously didn’t mind – for them, the more personal it was, the better. We had a long, real-life friendship to mend, but I knew that was never going to happen on camera.

Things came to a head during what would turn out to be one of our very last big scenes together. I’d just moved into my new flat, and all my real-life besties had been talking about coming round to see it and bringing me a housewarming present. On the day of my move, Amber turned up, Maddie turned up, but there was no sign of Chloe and this obviously upset me.

We arranged to meet, in a field, as you do, and it was all caught on camera for TOWIE. I tried to explain how I felt. I told her, ‘I feel a bit distant. I’ve always had your back and you haven’t had mine.’

She said straight away, ‘You didn’t even invite me to your house,’ but that made me cross, and I forgot all about the cameras. I told her, ‘Don’t bullshit me, I know there was a group chat, I know you knew when I was moving. You don’t need a phone call to turn up. You’re my best mate.’ That was true – we hadn’t phoned each other to arrange a meeting for years. We both knew that was rubbish. It was obviously an excuse. I felt she was making a big thing out of this, but it was pretty intense and upsetting, all the same.

So the longest friendship of my life ended in a field, with the cameras rolling. We screamed at each other, we both cried and it was terrible. We didn’t speak for a year after that – that’s right, a WHOLE YEAR. We literally used to walk past each other without making eye contact. If we were made to work together, we’d sit in the same room without looking at each other. It was possibly one of the hardest things I’ve had to do.

I decided to be civil, even though I’d already decided I wouldn’t talk to her again. I was on the show for a year-and-a-half, and this state of affairs lasted almost the whole final year of that. We got through it somehow.

I know we were both really hurt. We’d gone through all those years together, making our way to and from stage school, dreaming our big dreams. Our families knew each other, our lives had always been shared, and now that we were actually living the dream, we should have been enjoying it together. Instead, here we were, ignoring each other. It was just really, really sad.

The one chance Chloe had to win my friendship back came a while later, when we all flew to Marbella. I was going through an absolute nightmare with Pete by then – she knew about it and texted me once we got to the hotel, saying, ‘I’m here if you need to talk,’ which I thought was genuine.

But she didn’t say anything else, and she didn’t come to see me when I was sitting in my room crying. It ended up being Danielle Armstrong who came to check on me, even though before that, I wouldn’t have called her a close friend. Chloe never showed up, and instead, the next day, she showed others the text she’d sent me saying, ‘She didn’t reply.’ Once again, our private messages were being shown to others. By then, it didn’t even surprise me.

By the time I decided to leave the show, we’d somehow found a way of speaking civilly to each other when we needed to. They put me and Chloe together for one final scene, and someone said, ‘Maybe we can get Girl Band back on track.’ I replied, ‘No. Girl Band’s dead.’

My restaurant, the McK Grill in Woodford, launched in May 2017 – everyone was invited from TOWIE, but Chloe made a big deal on camera about not coming. For me, that’s when I knew I was done.

That same month, Dan Edgar had a birthday party for the series finale, and we all found ourselves in the same spot. Chloe told me she missed me and our long friendship, but I felt like I had to spell it all out again for her. Just because you keep saying you’re sad about something, doesn’t mean it’s suddenly okay. Yes, she’d been my mate for twenty years, but she’d also let me down. I think we both still wanted to rescue it, but it just didn’t happen.

Since leaving the show, she and I have had very little communication – just the odd text, low-level stuff. Recently, she messaged me to say happy birthday, and I’ll send her something similar, so it’s just a civil thing like that. To me, she chose TOWIE over our friendship, but for me twenty years of memories are hard to forget and it still leaves me feeling sad. But life goes on. We still live in the same Essex bubble and we’re always going to bump into each other. I’m pleased we can smile now and say hello when we do.

Looking back on TOWIE from where I’m sitting now, I can safely say it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, much harder than the previous shows I went on, even harder than CBB. I became such a big part of the storyline in such a short time, that other people knew if they attached something to me, it would work for them, too. That made it almost impossible for me to escape, and meant I was always surrounded by a lot of drama, even the stuff I didn’t bring on myself.

But you know what? It made for some great TV and brought me some amazing opportunities. Plus, looking back, they were all just moments in time that could have happened to anyone – my ones just happened to get caught on camera. The real challenge for me in the future is not being known as ‘Megan McKenna from TOWIE’, but just ‘Megan McKenna’.