52 The Times Magazineelanie Blake is not a woman who
is easily daunted. While everyone
else spent last year climbing the
walls, Blake decided that she
wasn’t just going to write a book;
she was going to become the new
queen of the bonkbuster. Five
years after Jackie Collins died,
Blake is eyeing up her crown.
She isn’t about to let a little thing
like a lethal pandemic get in her way.
“I’ve created a completely new genre that
has never been done before,” she says on the
phone from her home in north London.
“It’s a binge read within the pages of a book.
It’s completely different and the sex is from a
female perspective. Fifty Shades of Grey makes
me want to vomit. I’m enraged by the success
of that book, enraged, because it’s about
controlling women. If you’ve got to be tied up
to get off, you’re in bed with the wrong person.”
After a few minutes talking to Blake, you
realise that it’s not so much a conversation
as an entertaining monologue. A shrinking
violet she is not. She’s a ballsy, self-made
multimillionaire, unhampered by humility.
While others might hide their light under a
bushel, Blake is more likely to beam an entire
bank of spotlights onto herself and jump out
of a cake naked. If she blows the fuses for the
street in the process, well, so much the better.
The last time I spoke to her, 18 months
ago, she was talking about her first book, The
Thunder Girls. It was inspired by her early life
in the Nineties as a camera assistant-stroke-
dogsbody on Top of the Pops. They were
heady times, very sex and drugs and
rock’n’roll: Robbie Williams getting drunk,
Michael Hutchence getting high, Geri
Halliwell getting above herself and Mariah
Carey getting bored and demanding kittens
to play with. Britney Spears and Whitney
Houston were sweet but lost, and soap stars
turned pop stars were the worst of the lot.
“Monsters,” she told me. “Absolute monsters.”
Yet on their home turf, on set, it’s a
different matter. Blake’s second book, Ruthless
Women, draws on her subsequent career as
an extra on soaps. In truth, it was more of
a sideline than a career, as she segued from
Top of the Pops into talent management.
She set up her own agency, which specialised
in reinventing the careers of fading singers
from Steps, and Bros and Spandau Ballet.
She forged new careers for them after the
screaming stops, as she puts it. She was good
enough to buy her own house, an impressive
collection of designer handbags and shoes and
an extremely expensive “maintenance” habit.
She says she’s 44 now, a “glamorous woman”
who wants to keep it that way. Getting old
scares her, she admits, but woe betide anyone
who suggests that she’s had work done.
“I’ve had a lot of maintenance,” shecorrects me quickly, “not a lot of work. There’s
a big difference between the two phrases. I
maintain that I look good because I want to
look good for me. I’m not doing it for anyone
else. I have a certain look, a bit saucy, a bit
of fun, that lends itself quite well to the sexy
genre that I like to write in. If I looked like a
prison governor, I might write about crime.”
Ruthless Women is set on a fictional British
TV soap, Falcon Bay, a sort of Home and Away
meets EastEnders. The action barrels along
merrily, much of it horizontal, based on her
own experiences. She got her first job as an
extra on EastEnders, which was filmed in the
same place as Top of the Pops. She befriended
Gillian Taylforth, who later became a client.
Seeing as Top of the Pops only took up one
day a week, Blake spent the rest of her time
on the set of Coronation Street, Hollyoaks,
Brookside and Emmerdale. She was the woman
who stands unobtrusively at the bar nursing a
drink, the lowest of the low, she says, although
unobtrusive can’t have come easily. The
characters in Falcon Bay are straight out of
central casting: glamorous women, hunky
men, mendacious producers, insecure actors
and people stabbing each other in the front,
back and side. There is also a lot of sex.
Everyone in Falcon Bay is at it, all the time,
on set and off. Are soap sets like this?
“Totally 100 per cent. It’s a hotbed of
passion or a hot mess of backstabbing. That
fabulous sex scene with Lydia and the driver?”
she says, referencing a graphic scene in the
book. “I saw that with a real woman who’s on
television every night. My life has been filled
with bonking and mile-high madness and
high-octane raunchiness. Every sex scene in
that book, I’ve either seen it or done it myself.”
The worst behaviour she ever saw was not,
however, on set, but at a client’s wedding. It
was being featured in a celebrity magazine, and
therefore had a list of guests whose connection
with the happy couple was tenuous. You have
to have names to boost the deal, she explains.
More names equals more money. The
question isn’t whether so-and-so knows the
bride or groom; it’s whether they’ve got some
sort of connection, however vague, that might
justify inviting them. Bumping into them at an
awards ceremony two years before will do.
One of the guests at this particular wedding
was therefore another of Blake’s clients, “a
very well-known actress and notorious slut”.
“She had sex with the groom. It’s one of
the worst things I’ve ever seen and I had to
keep my mouth shut. This actress is still
on television, and she is shameless, rampant,
sex-mad, anything-would-do person.”
To be fair, it doesn’t reflect very well on
the groom, either. Blake shrugs.
“He was awful like most celebrity men are.
I’ve met a handful of celebrity partners who
are good eggs and the rest of the men havebeen grifters. Soap actors are either squeaky
clean or they’re rampant. We’ve got clients
that are genuinely butter wouldn’t melt, who
just turn up for work and live a normal life.
They’re the minority.”
It was at the awards ceremonies that things
turned juicy. She likens it to caged animals
who’ve been trapped in their compounds and
are suddenly on the loose, except with copious
booze and black tie. Behind closed doors, the
soap stars “intermingle”, and it’s not just the
stars. She reminisces fondly about growing
up fancying an actor in a soap, then finding
herself in the same room with him at an
awards ceremony 20 years later. “You’re going
to take the opportunity, aren’t you? And I did.”
Having said which, she took one man
home whom she describes as a legendary
soap lothario and a bitter disappointment.
“This is a really famous guy, well known for
being a stud muffin. He was absolutely useless.
He said, ‘Can we just cuddle?’ I said no, we
can’t. I’ve ordered you a cab. I thought, I’m
not going to listen to you snoring tonight.”
Blake didn’t waste her time on set merely
standing in the background. She schmoozed
the talent, including Beverley Callard from
Coronation Street and Claire King from
Emmerdale. “You’re the star of the show,” she
would whisper in their ear between takes, “but
you’re not getting the publicity you deserve.
That shoot you did with Hello!? That dress? It
should have been cut lower. You should have
looked more glamorous.” She says that they
loved her candour and they wanted someone
who’d have their back. Soap will churn you up
and spit you out, she says. “It’s dog-eat-dog,
but it doesn’t make them bad people.” It was
women such as Callard and King who were
among her first clients as an agent. It was theM
‘One famous guy, known
as a stud muffin, said,
“Can we just cuddle?”
I said, no, we can’t’
With her client, Beverley Callard of Coronation StreetCOURTESY OF MELANIE BLAKE