Two houses in Fulham, southwest London, both alike in value (£1.75 million-plus), differ from their neighbours in one way only: they have higher garden walls. One is owned by Louise Thompson, a former star of the reality soap Made in Chelsea, whom I visited almost six years ago and discovered what a troubled story she had to tell. The other, next door, is the home of her brother, Sam Thompson, and his girlfriend, Zara McDermott. It is they I am interviewing this afternoon.
The tall concrete walls are presumably there to deter prying eyes and press cameras, which is a little odd because, if you know of Thompson and McDermott at all, you probably already know a great deal about them. Their lives, I am tempted to write, are an open Facebook, but Facebook is the one strain of social media they avoid. On Instagram, on the other hand, Thompson has 2.5 million followers and McDermott 2 million; on TikTok 1.5 million follow him and 615,000 follow her. Nor do they confine themselves to the new media. They spill splashily over the old media too, both also being alumni of Made in Chelsea (and McDermott of Love Island) and in the past few months having separately featured on the two biggest shows on British television.
Thompson, who is 31, was crowned king of the jungle in December. In other words, he won ITV’s I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, beating the Brexit bogeyman Nigel Farage and the former boxer Tony Bellew, a result that surprised him since he felt that he was the least known of the contestants. Indeed he promises me he was more scared of mixing with these “crème de la crème” than any of his encounters with the competition’s spiders and snakes.
• Sam Thompson: Farage was paid £1.5 million? I’d have paid them
• Zara McDermott: I asked my ex public school partner why some posh boys behave so badly
Shortly after his triumph Thompson was anointed a roving reporter on ITV’s This Morning. An earlier assignment had him sent to cheer up Shoreham-by-Sea in West Sussex, which had been named Britain’s most miserable town. And cheer them up he did. He shows me a framed Guinness World Records certificate proclaiming he had given its citizens the most hugs in one minute in history — 88, since you ask. (You may also catch Thompson extending verbal hugs four evenings a week on Hits Radio.)
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“Actually,” he says, “they weren’t miserable in Shoreham-by-Sea at all. People, I think, are really inherently nice. Things get people down a lot, but people want to smile. I really do think that. And if that’s the most unhappy place, then, mate, we’re a pretty happy country.”
Only a little before her partner’s jungle adventure, McDermott, 27, became the fifth celebrity to be eliminated from BBC1’s Strictly Come Dancing. That Halloween exit will have been at least partly to do with her followers not being Strictly’s main demographic (oldies and young children), but she still cried. “I felt a bit lost for a bit,” she says. “I won’t lie. For a good few weeks I was feeling a bit like, ‘What am I going to do now?’ I’m never going to dance again.”
She will soon be back on our television screens with a documentary for which she spent months in Idaho talking to TikTokers who were playing amateur detectives in real-life murders. There is also a four-parter coming on Ibiza, which will cover the resort’s “good, bad and ugly” aspects. Both shows will be on BBC3, where she has already made very good and bravely personal documentaries on revenge porn, rape culture in schools and the distortion caused to people’s body image by — well, by people like her. And we shall come to all that.
Despite all the gigs, it is nevertheless “Interview with the influencers” that I have written in my diary. “The Influencers” recalls distant television series — The Avengers, The Protectors, The Persuaders — but Thompson and McDermott are on no secret mission and they are not The Hidden Persuaders of Vance Packard’s classic book that exposed the covert tricks of Fifties ad men. Rather, they flaunt their influence by posting images of themselves wearing or using or eating (but especially wearing) the products they are being paid in cash or kind to promote. Instagram is one long red carpet up which celebrities sashay in free frocks.
Thompson says it is a “female-led” industry and lets McDermott do the explaining. She was, she says, 19 or 20 and working as a government adviser when she realised that girls on Instagram were getting clothes free of charge. Fashion brands, noticing she had some 10,000 followers, got in touch: “Can we gift you our bikinis? Can we gift you some clothes?”
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If she is sent something she doesn’t like, does she still wear it?
“It depends if you’re getting paid for it, I suppose.”
So companies actually pay as well as donating clothes? Do her followers know?
“You have to disclose it.”
Thompson intervenes. “You have to write ‘Ad’ in the thing. That’s a big thing, actually. The ASA [Advertising Standards Authority] will do you if you don’t. Everyone is looking, which I think is great actually. ‘Influencer’ is almost like an annoying term. You’re not really influencing anyone. It’s more like a marketing campaign.”
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The process has become more symbiotic, McDermott says. A brand notices she is wearing its stuff and asks to work with her. “I now also resell my clothes,” she says. “I basically give them to other homes because nowadays you only really wear things once.”
“Sorry. What?” protests Thompson.
“Yes, girls, us girls. You know.”
“I’m learning more than you are here, mate,” he says.
“I don’t wear the same dress twice,” she doubles down.
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“I’ve worn the same Nikes I’ve had for ten years,” he counters.
“I know, but you’re not a fashionista.”
“You’re not wrong there.”
Since he works with McDonald’s, Coors and Domino’s, she really isn’t wrong, although his eyewear brand, Dinelli, launched last year, sells sunglasses for £65, which is surely approaching the upper mid-market. Increasingly, the products they most promote are their own. In the spring, McDermott launches her own clothing range, Rise, to be sold in high-street stores and designed for women from teenagers up. “I am hoping to see my mum and my nan in these pieces.”
As for Thompson, since October 2022 he has co-presented a podcast with his best friend from The Only Way Is Essex, Pete Wicks. It is called Staying Relevant, which, from the one I listen to, appears to mean relevant to them. It resembles a pub session in which two besties cement their mutual affection by liberal application of the f-word (although listening back to our conversation I find myself using it adjectively several times; perhaps I’ve been influenced). Staying Relevant goes on a nationwide stage tour from April and is already sold out.
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It was Wicks, rather than McDermott, who greeted Thompson when he left I’m a Celebrity in Australia. Touched, Thompson bought him a Cartier ring. McDermott shows no sign of jealousy, possibly because he says in front of us both that he intends to spend the rest of his life with her. She, meanwhile, counts this as her first real, proper, long-lasting relationship and says they are each other’s “support systems”. They disagree on how they met, but I will go with McDermott’s version, that she was at a fashion event and a friend spotted “the guy from Made in Chelsea” and described him as really hot.
“No one has ever said that,” says Thompson.
“No, no, no, she did say that. You are. Don’t sell yourself short. And she said, ‘And he’s got a lovely personality.’ So we just went and said hello to you up at the bar. It was one of those nights where you were in the VIP celebrity bit and I was in the normal cattle class.”
They connected again six months later (on social media, obviously) after she had been a contestant on ITV’s Love Island. Before she knew it, she was on Made in Chelsea herself as Thompson’s girlfriend and they have been together ever since, although Chelsea fans may remember a short split after she tearfully confessed that she had once cheated on him.
Bygones. They are the clearest possible evidence not only that opposites attract but that they stay attracted. He is an optimist, she a realist. He does not “overthink things”. She is thinking, always. Above all, while his extroversion is obvious, she is, upon a little scrutiny, an introvert.
“What do you think I am?” she asks.
“What? Of course you’re an introvert. You’re the most introverted person I know. That’s why I love you. Zara is one of those people who sometimes puts herself down a little bit, like, ‘Oh no, there’ll be someone better than me,’ and she actually normally turns out to be the best. She just sometimes needs to be coaxed out. She loves her home, she loves the cats. She would just stay here baking every day if she could.”
Extroverts, I say, need to be liked. Introverts need to be in control.
“That’s my biggest problem ever in the world, wanting to be liked,” says Thompson, who actually wrote a thank-you letter to I’m a Celebrity’s hosts, Ant and Dec, after the series was over.
“And my biggest problem is wanting to control everything,” McDermott says. “You’ve nailed us.”
Controlling Thompson may well be her biggest problem. And it is not his fault. Unusually for him — “I am more jazz hands” — two years ago he made a documentary (shown on Channel 4 last year). It was entitled Sam Thompson: Is This ADHD?. Opening with him fidgeting before the camera and containing a sequence in which McDermott complained it was hard to talk to him when he was fussing over a banana, it concluded that he did indeed have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, might be on the autistic spectrum and maybe had tics.
Yet Thompson appeared pretty much delighted with his diagnosis because it explained so much about him. His mother, Karen, a property developer, reluctant to see her son labelled, seemed less thrilled, while McDermott was pleased to find her suspicions confirmed, but looked frustrated by his disinclination to take the suggested medication.
“I wasn’t frustrated, but I wanted him to just give some things a go to see if they worked.”
He tried the pills for two days. “When I took them I panicked really hard because it calms you. Not calms you, but it levels you out and you see things through a perspective that I imagine Zara will see something or a neurotypical person would. And I panicked.”
“He hated every moment of it,” McDermott says.
“Reality started kicking in. I went, ‘Oh my God, I’m doing way too much.’ I’ve got my radio show, my podcast. I’ve got new businesses coming out. And I went, ‘What am I doing?’”
He opted for therapy instead and it has helped his concentration, which is perfect this afternoon.
His parents split up when he was nine, but Thompson says he enjoyed a happy childhood in west London and at his boarding schools, the first of which he was sentenced to aged seven.
That sounds cruel, I say.
“That’s what Zara said, yeah. But I actually loved it.”
“I think you’ve blocked it out.”
“I loved it. I genuinely did. I think it taught me how to be social. I made the best friends. When I went to secondary school, which was also a boarding school, and everyone was crying at the age of 13, I was like, ‘Why’s everyone crying?’”
“Like, ‘This ain’t my first rodeo,’” McDermott says.
He was happy at Bradfield College near Reading, but he did not thrive academically and left with a C, a D and a U at A-level. He apologised to his millionaire father for the money he had wasted. The problem, of course, was the undiagnosed attention deficit. “Every single report card — maths, history, science, headmaster, whatever — it was the same: ‘Lovely boy, needs to apply himself more.’ ‘Likeable guy, needs to concentrate more.’ ‘Never concentrates.’ ‘Disruptive in class, but a likeable boy.’”
He was talent-spotted while working as a barman. “Monkey Kingdom, the production company, walked into my bar and went, ‘Hey, we’re here for the after-party for Made in Chelsea.’ I went, ‘Oh, my sister’s on your show,’ and they said, ‘Do you want to come and have a chat?’ I was like, ‘Beats this. Yes, I’ll be there.’ I was 20 years old.”
His older sister, Louise, had been on the show since its second season. Fighting to play out the Chelsea plotlines while living as a student at Edinburgh University, she became incredibly anxious, not least because on Twitter/X, viewers were calling her a poison dwarf or “Ratty”. “Weirdly,” she told me in 2018, “the UK, or our viewership, likes to prey on the weak.” She drank “to oblivion” and would wake up in her father’s house thinking she was dying. She did not tell the programme makers about her mental health. They, she said, did not inquire.
Louise was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and left Chelsea in 2019, since when she has been afflicted with ill health. Her brother says she is much better now, after some bad years and complications around childbirth. “In fact, I’d go as far as to say she’s great.”
True to character, Louise’s little brother loved his eight years on the show, and found the aftercare offered by the producers “great”. He departed three years ago only because he reckoned Chelsea was “a young man’s game”. It had not so much opened doors for him as shown him there were doors, “Like radio, podcasting, hosting, presenting, all those things. And if you want it enough, you can do it.”
While he was boarding, McDermott was living happily at home in Havering in east London with her father, Alan, a musician turned IT executive, and her mother, Karen, a food tech and textile assistant at the comprehensive Zara went to. There she was badly bullied. One time the whole class stood up and gave her a Nazi salute because of the faint moustache on her upper lip. “I was good at school, but I hated every moment of it.”
When she was 14, a boy in the crowd that bullied her asked her to send him a nude snap. Wanting to be liked, she took one in the bath and sent it via BlackBerry Messenger. Next thing she knew, it had been shared around the school.
“It was a really awful period. This was quite new, this whole sharing of photos and messaging. I was one of the first people this happened to. And I was the one who got suspended. The boy got off scot-free. The school basically threatened to expel me. They called the police on me and they told me I could go to prison for creating child pornography. I was 14.”
When she told this story on her documentary, Revenge Porn, in 2021, the school offered a half-apology, saying things had changed.
• Zara McDermott: Revenge porn almost ruined my life
Despite everything, she stayed on for her A-levels and got three A’s. She elected not to go to university, but to take up a government apprenticeship that mixed work experience in Whitehall with studying for a foundation degree in business studies. She worked with civil servants on climate change and then, as she had hoped, entered the Department for Education, where she planned “to make schools better from the inside”.
Her career was disrupted, however, by Love Island’s approach in 2018, an invitation her father, to her amazement, encouraged her to accept on the grounds that it is the things you do not do in life you end up regretting (he may have been thinking of his music career).
Even though she was dumped by her TV beau after ten days, Love Island made her name. The next year she competed in X Factor: Celebrity and began on Chelsea. It was also a distressing time. She had sent three intimate images of herself to the man she had been going out with. When Love Island aired, the photographs went viral. Whether or not this was “revenge porn”, such things are now defined as image-based sexual assaults.
The question, naturally, is having been traduced once when she was a teenager, why had she laid herself open to it happening again?
“I think when you’re in a relationship with someone, you trust them implicitly,” she says. “That’s part of being in a relationship. You don’t think they’re ever going to do anything horrible to you.”
What would her advice be to teenage girls on sexting?
“My advice would be: don’t take the risk, because of what I’ve experienced, but I also think that in today’s day and age, people live their relationships online.”
I don’t get it.
“It’s about showing people what you can get and what you have. ‘Look at what I have access to. Look at this person. Look at what this person is trusting me with. Look what they’ve sent me. Here you go, boys! Have a look.’”
Her documentary helped lead to a change in the law. It is now not only illegal to distribute intimate photographs without permission, but to threaten to do so. The film is shown in schools. “All the stuff I dreamed of doing when I got into that government job, I’m doing now.”
Following the related Uncovering Rape Culture documentary the same year, in 2022 she made Zara McDermott: Disordered Eating, about the contribution of social media and social media influencers to distorting girls’ body images. She had wandered into this minefield when she was fat-shamed for looking overweight in holiday pictures she had posted after Love Island (she was a size 10). Then, when she lost weight, she was attacked again as a bad example to potential anorexics.
So the question is this: now she knows influencers can make people dissatisfied with their bodies, does she regret the breast augmentation surgery she underwent in 2021? I ask partly because her Instagram feed is generally very tame but the weekend before we meet she shared a photo of herself in a tight, low-cut red dress.
“I don’t think so.”
Did she have the surgery because bikini manufacturers asked her?
“No. I just had some things that I wanted to change. I just wanted to feel more symmetrical in clothes and stuff like that. Most of my friends have had breast augmentation.”
“I didn’t know that was the word,” Thompson chips in.
“Breast augmentation? Yeah.”
“All I hear is ‘boob jobs’.”
“Boob job,” she says resignedly. “No, no, I think I would have had that anyway because after I lost a bit of weight, my body did change. I’m happy with that decision. Genuinely, I am.”
It is a quite unrealistic body shape, though, isn’t it, when you are so slim?
“One hundred per cent, but it’s really hard to know what to share and what not to share. People don’t like to feel like you’re hiding something from them, but the problem is, if you’re honest, people can think that you’re trying to influence them and there’s a real difference.”
At the risk of sounding like William Gladstone trying to save a fallen woman, I ask whether she might not just drop this influencing lark and concentrate on the documentary-making. She explains it is her social media presence that brings people to the journalism, and the careers work well together. They are certainly mutually corrective. Instagram Zara advertises a carefully constructed fantasy; BBC3 Zara explores unaugmented reality.
Which brings me again to the difference between Thompson, who thinks people are “great”, and McDermott, whose life story and journalism suggest they very often are not.
“I meet people who have gone through the worst things,” she says.
“And I’ve been very lucky,” he says. “I’ve met some amazing people and I just look at them and go, ‘Life’s hard, but smile.’ I feel like people just want to laugh.”
“That’s what you bring,” she says.
He is a delightful young man and she is very bright and likeable, and both know nothing works out without hard work. Together, from the flippant to the philosophical, they probably run the gamut of what it is like to be young today — and how to monetise it. As parents used to say of their children’s friends, all in all they are a good influence. Certainly on each other.
