Because I wasn’t much of a looker and was very insecure I was an easy target for bullies. It wasn’t until I was about 16 that I discovered that being funny could make me more popular. I had no idea that if you made people laugh they would like you more. It may be part of the reason why I love comedy so much now. A lot of comedians have admitted they were bullied at school and so they used comedy as a way to deal with it or escape from the bullies.
I looked so young and prepubescent that I actually wanted spots so I would seem more grown up. I’ll never forget being in Boots with my sister. I was buying Clearasil to try and seem mature, and just to embarrass me in front of the woman on the cash desk Amelia shouted, ‘You don’t even need it. You don’t even get spots.’ My mum turned around and said, ‘It’s preventative, darling.’ Brilliant. I had the perfect excuse to hand over my money and trot back to boarding school with my badge of hormonal honour.
Although we bickered a lot, my amazing sister kind of saved me at that school. She ran the school tuck shop, so that made me a little bit more popular than I otherwise would have been. I had an allowance of £5 a week, which was a lot of money in those days, and I was allowed to put anything I bought from the tuck shop on the school bill. That was the dream.
If I wanted to impress a girl I would get an entire box of sweets and flash them around. Like bankers buying bottles of vodka in London night clubs, you may look like a bit of a pretentious twat, but it gets the ladies running. They may not have fancied me, but I could lure them over with a bag of Space Invaders. Or, if it was summer, an ice-pop. The ice-pop was considered the king of sweets. You couldn’t get much better.
I’m probably making boarding school sound slightly dreadful, but it wasn’t all that bad. I would definitely send my kids to that very school because I discovered so much about life. When you’re stuck in a dorm with an eclectic mix of kids you find out so much about people. You have the cool kid, the nerdy kid, the brainy kid, the goth kid (Richard Dinan – yes, seriously). You see things from all angles and it’s such a learning curve.
Amelia and I were always arguing as children. We fought like cat and dog and love-hated each other in the way siblings often do. It was probably only a couple of years ago that we properly started getting on as grown ups, and now we’re like friends as well as brother and sister.
After several months of worrying non-stop about my mum, things took a massive upturn when she landed a job by complete fluke. Mum was still working for Max FM when she got scouted by the BBC. At the time, she was talking about chlamydia and sexual diseases on a midnight show listened to by about three university students, yet she managed to get spotted by a man called Chris Van Schaick. It turned out he was the head of the BBC in Hampshire, and later that week he gave her a job as a presenter on BBC Radio Solent, where she stayed for the next 12 years.
After that, everything changed. There was no more delivering videos or late nights spent at the bottom of a Martini bottle. We moved house to a lovely place in the centre of Southampton and we started a new chapter in our life.
My first celebrity crush, which started when I was eight, was Denise van Outen, who very slowly became my dream girl. My friend’s mum worked for Channel 4 and she invited us to go along to the filming of The Big Breakfast. I fell in love with Denise the moment I met her. I remember her giving me a friendly wink, and I totally decided that she was the one. I grinned all the way home and I used to scour my mum’s magazines for pictures of her, which I would tear out and plaster all over my bedroom walls.
By the time I was 11 my obsession had properly kicked in – probably along with my hormones. I used to sign RDA – meaning Respect Denise Always – after my name every single time I wrote it. Perhaps Ollie Locke RDA still adorns the toilet walls and classroom tables at my old school? I remember being genuinely upset when she got engaged to Jay Kay because I was convinced that she would love me if she got to know me. I almost threw a party when the engagement was called off, and it made me fall for her even harder.
Now, the awful thing is, I’ve since got to know her and bump into her every few months at parties around London, where we double-cheek kiss and I try not to say anything stupid. And recently, at an Elton John AIDS Foundation benefit, to my horror I was sat next to Jay Kay. I certainly did not tell him of my childhood hatred towards him for stealing my woman.
If Denise reads this book, she’ll know that I was once her biggest fan. Imagine if I ever told her that I’ve still got the newspaper cutting from when she got engaged to Jay Kay in an old diary somewhere? Mortifying.
Denise kind of bridged the way between me being a little kid and heading, confused and bewildered, into puberty. I knew I wasn’t a boy any more because I was about to start my first year of high school, but I was far from being a man. I wasn’t quite sure where I slotted in.
I think puberty is one of the hardest things we go through. My top tips would be to wear deodorant and wash your face thoroughly every night. Also, don’t pick spots. I did, and I’ve got three small scars as a result.
When I was 12 I moved schools and started going to Embley Park, which is a small boarding school based in Florence Nightingale’s old family house in Romsey, Hampshire. It was the most beautiful school and I’d look out every morning and see deer on the golf course. Yes, the school had a golf course. Ridiculous, I know.
I went out with a succession of girls while I was there. I hadn’t really expanded my relationship skills since Jemima Hoare, so it was very much about holding hands and imagining that you’d be together for eternity, then dumping one another by letter the next day but feeling terribly grown up while doing so.
I was now with a completely different group of people to those I’d been friends with at my last school, so it was a chance to reinvent myself a bit. I was determined I would no longer be ‘Oliver the loser’ with unruly hair (yes, you may be surprised to know that those silky locks once had a mind of their own). I started to buy hair gel so I could literally stick my centre parting to my forehead if it didn’t behave itself, giving it absolutely no choice to move. Who’s cool now, Ridgeway? I also changed my name to Ollie and stopped talking about fish quite as much as I had done previously.
I started to actually enjoy school for the first time ever. I still wasn’t great academically, but I got much more involved in singing and acting. It was a brilliant way to express myself, and taking part in school productions gave me a focus. It’s hard to imagine the link, but it also gave me the opportunity to fondle my first ever pair of boobs.
The boobs in question belonged to a girl called Tiffany, who was known to, ahem, put out. Hence I went for her. I was 14 by this time and we were putting on a show called Space Queen Malajusta and the Video Kidz. It was no Hamlet, but it would do for now. I had a starring role as an ageing superhero and I felt pretty awesome.
One night after the show Tiffany and I crept behind a rail of coats and started snogging. It must have been the super-hero confidence that made me slyly slide my hand under her top and inside her bra and have a grope. She certainly didn’t try to stop me at any point so I was absolutely over the moon. If Twitter had been around back then I would have posted my triumph in seconds. She had really big boobs and I was thrilled to have finally felt a real one, nipple and all. It was everything I expected and more. Apart from how they actually felt; in my mind I expected them to have the weight and texture of a bag of sand, but in fact they felt more like a water balloon filled with cottage cheese.
I was quite keen to repeat the episode – and hopefully gain some more experience into the bargain – but second time around, she wasn’t interested. Did I grope wrong? Who was to know? Personally, I felt I was firm but gentle. Even the girl who had a bit of a rep as a go-getter didn’t want to come back for seconds! Fuck