The Tab meets: MiC’s Ollie Locke

I promise you if you meet Ollie Locke, you’ll love him.

He’s got that minor celebrity charm thing down to a tee. Or maybe it’s because he’s posh. Or because he has to do much more mingling than the average person.

He walks in and greets me with a firm handshake – the kind that makes you want to give him a job – and a kiss on each cheek. Halfway through the interview, some feckless students walk into the room we’re in and me and Ollie share a “what the fuck” look. Man, he’s great.

We look related but are not related

I ask him why he keeps coming back – this is the second time he’s spoken at the Union, and in his speech he says that Cambridge is his second favourite city after London. He leans way forward on his chair and starts telling me about his year at Cambridge – on a RADA foundation course.

He gushes: “I had the best year of my life here, it was really wonderful. I had no strings attached, no worries. And I had the most amazing group of friends, all the punting and the cycling and the stupidness, we had so much fun.”

The Union, in fact, holds even more great memories for him. I ask him for more funny stories about his time at Cambridge and he says, lowering his voice, “I was sick in the Union toilets. A lot.”

It’s hard to convey the kind of breathless enthusiasm that Ollie has when he talks, not just about his time at Cambridge but absolutely everything – the show, his book, smoking. But it’s Cambridge he’s most excited to talk about. He says the city took him and his friends in. He felt like a member of the “elite society of Cambridge” which he wasn’t really a part of because, he jokes, the drama kids weren’t intelligent, just “good in front of a camera.”

This fascination with the elite also explains his love of fame. He doesn’t say it outright but as he’s talking about becoming a London socialite, then how well his book, Laid in Chelsea did (it’s unsurprisingly a collection of autobiographical sex stories), you sense a little kid inside who’s opened their Christmas presents early. He says he wanted to be a writer or an actor, but you can tell he especially loves being celebrity.

Everyone wants a picture with Ollie

And he’s a hopeless romantic, talking about the relationship he had with a girl he met last time he spoke at the Union. He says would come up to Cambridge every weekend to cook Sunday roasts. Describing how they met, I get a glimpse of Ollie’s real charm. “I made a joke about Shakespeare, because her friend was called Cressida. I said that Cressida was a bit of a cunt but she said she didn’t know anything about English.” He said he recited a speech to them, there and then. And he does it again, now, reels it off at breakneck speed, and then smiles. “She was like, he’s actually quite intelligent. Really, it’s the only thing I know from the play.”

After I stop recording and we’ve taken the obligatory awkward hands-round-hip photo, he asks, with a wry smile, “apparently you lot (The Tab) were really hard on Robert Downey Jr.” I’m taken aback, wondering: does he think I’m going to be as mean? And then I wonder, does he really care? He’s talked before about not caring about privacy and he’s incredibly candid about his personal life. And there’s not much I could say which hasn’t been said, with a lot more swearwords, by someone on Twitter.

There’s a vulnerability about him which occasionally morphs into self-congratulation, an irritating earnestness which made him one of the only likeable people on Made in Chelsea. Ollie Locke just seems so incredibly human. 

That may not seem like high praise, but the show invites you to see the characters as insipid two-dimensional characters. And really, he’s not.