The power of Towie how ITVs hit show

changed Essex
Five years of The Only Way is Essex havent just made Amy Childs, Mark Wright and pals
into stars, it has also made Brentwood a very modern kind of cultural destination.

Tim Burrows

Monday 28 September 2015 16.01 BST Last modified on Tuesday 29 September 2015
00.00 BST

Brentwood in Essex is home to what must be the most opulent Slug and Lettuce in the
country. Chandeliers hang above the boozing City boys and glamorous twentysomethings
who sit on crushed-velvet chairs, enjoying the first stop on a night that may well end up
inside the Sugar Hut nightclub across the road.

Its what you might call the Towie effect. When The Only Way is Essex first aired on 10
October 2010, its structured reality format and cosmetically enhanced, orange-hued beings
we saw on screen felt like a gimmick: Hollyoaks relocated to the edge of the M25. Critics
mocked the characters acting their way through their own lives in such wooden fashion that it
must have been scripted (it wasnt exactly). Comedian Grinne Maguire summed it up:
Nothing happens in it. Its like a never-ending hen night mixed with Waiting for Godot.

But almost as soon as it was ridiculed, the show that followed the lives of club-promoting
geezer-turned-heartthrob Mark Wright, Essex-girl caricature Amy Childs, wannabe glamour
model Sam Faiers and their friends became an obsession. The New York Times deemed it
the most talked-about British television show of 2011; the same year it won the Audience
award at the Baftas. Joey Essex (real name) joined in season two and duly became the perfect
media entity, part swoonsome teen idol, part figure of ridicule. Even series 12 in 2014 was
drawing in 1.87 million viewers; the same year Jennifer Lawrence called it ridiculously
amazing.

When it started, half the cast were from Brentwood and the other half were further west in
Essexs wealthy golden triangle of Chigwell, Buckhurst Hill and Loughton. Im from the less
salubrious environs of Southend, at the mouth of the Thames. To watch Towie take off was
bemusing to me and other Essex natives. Wed grown up with Essex-girl jokes and white-van
stereotypes but now Essex had gone global, morphing into an adjective that described a
permatanned and cosmetically enhanced pursuit of beauty, wealth and celebrity.

And it transformed Brentwood. Shortly after Towie started, the tourists arrived, initially from
the UK and Ireland, and then further afield: the US, Canada, even Australia. Enterprising
Essex duly went into overdrive, turning the town into the opposite of Banksys Dismaland: an
unironic celebration of retail England. The queue for the Sugar Hut, the bar most associated
with Towie (which had a former life as the 15th century-built White Hart Inn noted by
Pevsner for its remarkably good coaching yard), spills halfway down the high street at
weekends. The Premier Inn does a roaring trade, as does Murphys, the bar next door, which
has invented a shot in honour of Towie. Two-for-one cocktail deals abound. Yet the change
could be described as an accentuation, not a reinvention. Brentwoods main drag looks like
any prosperous high street in the all-right-jack south-east only more so.

Photographer Bronia Stewart started coming to Brentwood to document the change in

January 2014. When I first came here, I saw how people were really embracing that
stereotype. People across the UK are going to Brentwood to feel part of it. Stewart found it
difficult to get trust from the people she met. Its been very hard to find a way in.
Approaching people on the street has been hard because they are used to paparazzi. Stewart
visited the Sugar Hut (which banned her from shooting) and other bars, and even appeared in
an episode of the show as an extra. She found a community at the behest of its towns new
logic. Often youll go into a pub and youll have a table of about eight girls with all their
hair in curlers, beautiful clothes on, says Ryan Fleming, a taxi-driver and security guard
turned film-maker who Stewart befriended. Nine times out of 10 theyre from somewhere in
Ireland, probably the first time theyve been out of the country. Theyve all spent about 400
quid each to come to sit in a pub in Brentwood.

Stewart also went on the Towie bus tour, a shopping excursion by default, as most of the
shows stars have started their own retail businesses in Essex. It takes in Joey Essexs shop
Fusey, Sam and Billie Faiers shop, Minnies, and Amy Childs boutique, among others,
before travelling to Loughton to stop at Lydia Brights store (often if a cast member wears an
item of clothing on the show, it can sell out quickly). It came under the ire of local
Conservative councillor Chris Hossack in August: This whole thing of people coming in
from all four corners of the UK walking round Brentwood with selfie sticks I think its
putting off a demographic of local people.

When the northern girls come into our salon, we really ham it up, so they get the full Essex
experience

Southend-based tour guide Louise Stanton thinks the critics are just grumpy. Every time I
think the show is on its way out, it isnt, she says. At the start we did a coach tour every
now and then on a Saturday. Now we run three four-hour tours every Saturday, with 30
people per coach. Its usually women: hen parties, makeup packages to look like a Towie
star. Louise has been an extra in Towie and says she exaggerates her Essex-ness during the
tour. Through years of representation in Mike Leigh films, Birds of a Feather, newspaper
editorials and the rest, the idea of Essex has manifested into a kind of performance. The
vulgar Essex person was in part invented by the media, but in lampooning self-made men and
women for luxuriating in their sudden wealth, it created a myth, and gave the children of the
original Essex men and women a lucrative commodity for our age of communications:
themselves.

And you dont have to be from Essex to be Essex. When you go to Spain you want to see
people speaking Spanish, says Yasmin Bettis, a hairdresser from Hemel Hempstead who
recently moved to Brentwood and who met Stewart on the Towie set. When the northern
girls come into the salon, we really ham it up, so they feel like theyre getting the full Essex
experience. When people have had their hair blow-dried really big, everyone knows it looks
really ridiculous. They take the mickey out of themselves for wanting to be orange and have
big hair.

Towie was attacked in passing by the employment minister and Essex MP Priti Patel, when
announcing a new plan for youth employment in June: Were committed to bringing in a
new scheme that will see young people with no work experience either earning or learning
so that no young person thinks that Towie-style fame is the only way to get ahead.

Cast members dispute this. As they earn not much more than 100 for each show, they top it
up with their businesses or appearances around the country. Towies implicit role as the face
of working-class-made-good might explain why it has turned its five minutes of fame into an
industry, whereas other reality shows such as Desperate Scousewives (set in Liverpool),
Geordie Shore (Newcastle) or The Valleys (Wales) havent so much.

Brentwood will soon be part of the new Crossrail development, bringing London closer than
ever. Whether this will help bring yet more visitors to the town or not relies on how long the
show can keep attracting people. Now preparing to launch a 16th series, Lime Pictures would
like it to be realitys version of EastEnders. But whether or not this happens, Towie has
become part of the televisual furniture; more than that, as a spectacle it mirrors a way of life
in which people have become performers of their own situations. Its characters stage their
own lives, as do we.

The new series of The Only Way is Essex starts on 4 October on ITVBe. Trying to Fit a
Number to a Name: The Essex Estuary by Tim Burrows and Lee Rourke is published by
Influx Press.