With his gloriously camp 'go girlfriend' patter, Gok Wan has become famous for making women feel better about their bodies. How ironic, then, that he himself is such a bundle of insecurities.
BY Sabine Durrant | 03 July 2011
Photo: DANIEL STIER
Gok Wan is having his photograph taken, in a room above a bar in coolest Hoxton, east London, but there are portable stage-lights blocking the door, which means I have to wait outside for a while and listen to him before I see him.
'Ooh, legs akimbo?' he is saying. 'If that's what you want. In-ter-es-ting position. Shag, anyone?' He tells the photographer an X-rated story about another celebrity's waxing treatment with a lot of camp swoops of tone. When his mobile phone goes off, he thrills, 'Excuse me. That'll be my humility calling. Oh God, me and my shame.'
The snatch of room that I can see is decorated along burlesque lines, all red velvet and silky pink drapes, satin boudoir cushions and lamps made out of statues of naked women. I'm expecting to find him in theme, dressed like a French courtesan, or at least in some of his more extreme television garb - bondage chains and string vests, a sequinned evening jacket over a polished torso, or those jeans that sit not just low, but actually under his Calvin Kleins.
But - no, what a surprise. Here is a tall, neat, handsome man in camel trousers, a nice blue jumper and a buttoned-up grey shirt, dressed as he later says, 'like a Scandinavian architect'.
When we sit down away from the camera, he is immediately down to earth and thoughtful. 'It's not a role. It's a magnified version of who I am. If I want to get into people's personal space, being very monotone and matter-of-fact and intellectual about it - well, it's just not going to happen. I realised early on I could get more of my own way on TV if I became this bigger, gayer, louder, slightly more obnoxious character.'
Gok Wan doesn't like being called a celebrity - 'I don't have a celebrity lifestyle, but I am famous because people recognise who I am' - so let's call him a phenomenon. When How to Look Good Naked first hit the screens in 2006, following on the tidy clickety-clack kitten heels of Trinny and Susannah, its effect was electric.
Here were fat women and thin women and inbetween women, young, old, middle-aged, talking with agonising honesty about their bodies. Some couldn't get out of the car at the school gates for shame, some hadn't had sex with their husbands for years.
Gangly, weirdly dressed, peculiarly coiffed, oddly perfect, Gok talked with them, cried with them, scooped their 'bangers' into better bras, and shopped with them - and when, at the end of the allotted hour, the 'Goked' women proudly paraded their stuff down a catwalk, two million viewers let out a collective cheer.
Gok's Fashion Fix followed in 2008, then Gok's Clothes RoadShow and Miss Naked Beauty , and deals with Specsavers and Sainsbury's, and an appearance on Desert Island Discs , and now an autobiography, Through Thick and Thin , in which the young working-class gay lad from Leicester reveals his obesity as a teenager, the bullying he suffered at school, his failed period at drama school and his subsequent anorexia.
If the television programmes were about personal battles and survival, the presenter has become the ideal embodiment: 'You can't look at yourself in the mirror and hate yourself so much that you would consider taking your own life, you can't remember how horrendous that is, and disgusting and isolating and lonely, without being able to relate to people,' he tells me. 'I get it. I am not a doctor, or a psychologist - we all know I am not - but it allows me to be a mate.'
And he does seem like a mate. It's almost impossible not to warm to him, which is good because, 'all I have ever wanted is for people to like me'. He has certain little tricks, unconscious I am sure, that make it easier. He touches your knee a lot, and has inclusive verbal tics, like 'do you know what I mean?' and 'you know what?'
He says he is a nightmare to work with, a total perfectionist. Sainsbury's for example probably thought it could just hang his name above some clothes, but 'I'm driving them nuts. It's down to the length of the stitching.'
And it's the same with conversation; he conducts an internal dialogue with himself, worrying away about getting it right ('is that the right word ? yes, it is ? is it?'). He is engagingly, almost obsessively, honest, and only occasionally, as when describing his new programme, Gok's Teens: the Naked Truth , about children with terrible lives, as 'personally very therapeutic' does the honesty sound like self-absorption.
He says he is constantly stressed: 'It's getting worse as I get older. I'm getting more insecure.' When he was writing his book he was racked with guilt about old friends and kept ringing them up, 'but it was bull- and horrendous'. His anorexia
is under control, but 'I'm not going to lie, it never goes away'.
He panics when he is on camera 'that I'm getting it wrong, I've said the wrong thing'. And when I ask if, on Fashion Fix , he is as upset as he looks when he loses to Brix Smith-Start, he answers with deep seriousness, 'Mortified. I take it really personally. There are tears. I do get in the car afterwards and it's a four-hour drive home with me in the back on the phone to my mum, sobbing.'
He was born in Leicester in 1974, the youngest of three, to an English mother and a Chinese father. His parents ran a restaurant and were busy, worried about money, through much of his childhood.
'When I was going through all my crap, when I felt like a social outcast, it didn't seem right to bring my troubles to them because they had their own.'
He was overweight - 'I love everything about food, always have done' - was bullied at school as a child and abused in the street as a teenager - many of the same issues suffered by the young people he hangs out with in Gok's Teens . 'I've learnt that my teenage years were no different to what children are going through now. You don't try and fix them; the important thing is you walk away thinking, "Actually, I am not on my own." And asking for help is the first step.'
When he talks about his upbringing, his overeating, the anorexia, he blames no one but himself. He talks, with ingrained habits of self-loathing, about his fear of failure, his insecurity. 'An eating disorder is about having to be in control of something, having a fear that if you lose control of that you lose control of the rest of your life.'
It was, 'corny as it sounds', the love of his family that got him though. With his recovery came work as a make-up artist and stylist and then, 'being in the right place at the right time', he found himself on GMTV , talking about dresses at the Baftas. Other auditions followed and in 2006 pre-production began on How to Look Good Naked .
He is at his most impassioned when talking about that show. He says, 'It came at a time when women needed to find a voice. Forget the fashion bits, forget it was presented by a gay guy - which it probably shouldn't have been, though whether we like it or not a gay man can get something out of a woman that a straight man, or another woman, couldn't. It was just about that moment when every woman thought, "I am allowed to feel this." It gave this amazing sense of community.'
Fame has brought its own problems - a kind of 'Beatlemania' he calls it. Women chase him down the street. If he is staying in a hotel, even under a false name, he is regularly mobbed.
'Being 6ft 1in and looking as I do has its drawbacks. There is no way I can hide. I can't be mistaken for Ken Hom. I am going to be Gok Wan. Couple that with the overly excitable exterior and the insistent need to be tactile - if you see that in your living-room for an hour you are going to want to hug me.
'Plus the book ? they know about my life now. "How's your sister?" "How's E'lain [his best friend]?" It is really hard. I have never felt more need to have a private life, but without it all I wouldn't exist. It just means I have to customise my life.'
Travelling on the Tube is out - 'I've done public transport in the last few years but it gets crazy' - as is any visit to a gig: 'It becomes a health and safety risk.' When women come up to him in a club, 'when it's 11pm and you're pissed', and ask for their body type, he has got his answer down pat: 'I'm not working now - are you?'
He shops, anywhere from Bond Street to the high street, at speed - 'I do understand. If you saw Gordon Ramsay in the supermarket you'd be in his basket' - and has learnt that if he goes regularly to the same bars the clientele leaves him alone. 'And then I hate myself for it because I am from a council estate, but I've got membership of a couple of clubs 'cos if I have a meeting and I say, "Right, let's go to Costa," then we would never get the meeting done.'
He has 'a really nice home' down the road in Shoreditch, a Range Rover 'that I love', and goes on holiday twice a year - usually to a country where his show isn't played, like Thailand.
He goes out five nights out of seven - 'more than usual at the moment because I am newly single. Obviously not just for one-night stands but just not to be on my own.'
His love life is the one thing he doesn't talk about in his book, so it's only tentatively that I ask if it had been a long-term relationship.
'Yeah. Do you know what? I am vulnerable at the moment. It's new, so it's not a great area for me to talk about.' Then, as if he can't stop himself, 'It's definitely affected me. Definitely. To what extent I don't know yet. It always takes a little while. The break-up process takes longer as you get older.'
Thirty-seven isn't that old, I tell him. 'It is, it's almost 40.' Yes, but it's not 40. He gives a shudder, makes a little moue with his mouth. 'I have to prepare myself. Gay men do that.'
Does he mind getting older? 'Do you want the truth? I am terrified of being old and single. I worry that I have created this world that has so many doors to go through to get to the centre of it that I worry I have run out of time, or keys, to give to people to get in there. Is that the worst analogy in the entire world?'
He puts his hand to his breastbone, as if trying to squash the demons down. 'It really is great being fabulous at 40,' he says. 'But it's a bitch being famous and 40.'
'Gok's Teens: the Naked Truth' is on Channel 4 later this year. 'Through Thick and Thin' (Ebury, �7.99), by Gok Wan, is available from Telegraph Books
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