Lauren Goodger’s Regret: Desire to Undo Mistake; Amy Childs Discusses Weight-Loss Struggles and Painful Jab Side Effect

Everyone thinks they know what makes a TOWIE Christmas: high drama, high hair and high finance, with storylines as combustible as a Christmas pudding soaked in brandy.

Yet here we are, 15 years after the launch of the legendary reality TV show, looking at a festive special which somehow breaks with tradition. The cast of tanned and tweaked faces is older and wiser, there’s more grit and less glitter, and when they say the word ‘family’ they mean the partners and children who’ve arrived since they became famous, not just each other.

TOWIE remains a titan of TV, one of ITVX’s most streamed titles, with 66 million views over the last 12 months. It’s also a cultural behemoth. Who knew what a ‘vajazzle’ was until Amy Childs made them famous?

The show’s stars have always been so much larger than life – think of Gemma Collins and Joey Essex – that it’s been easy to forget they weren’t actors in a drama, but real people. So here, it’s confronting to hear Lauren Goodger talk about the death of her baby daughter; to listen to Amy speak about being relentlessly trolled; and to have Dan Edgar admit that his love life would have been far easier had it been private rather than prime time.

The trio are sitting together on a sofa, an ultra professional camera-ready reality TV team, even if their ‘work’ today is sipping champagne and swapping presents. So it’s also instructive to hear them talking about the private, off-screen, off-duty bonds they share as part of a cast that invented the ‘scripted reality’ genre, in which authentic storylines come with all the dramatic power of a soap opera.

It would have taken a brave scriptwriter to create Lauren, 39, who returned to TOWIE full time in 2024 after a 12-year absence. She has long been famous for her complicated love life (including a tempestuous relationship with Mark Wright, who’s now married to Michelle Keegan), her multiple cosmetic procedures and her love-hate relationship with the paparazzi. She’s the sort of celeb who can cause a storm simply by going shopping in a new velour co-ord and flip flops.

But all that faded to nothing when her new baby daughter Lorena died in July 2022.

These days she brings her first-born, four-year-old Larose, onto the set of TOWIE. Having her there as she works is a symbol of everything she’s fought for, a rebuilding of the stability and routine she needed to navigate her way out of the unimaginable tragedy of losing a child.

‘I’m very good at masking things,’ Lauren reflects. ‘I’ve grown a very thick skin in my job over the years, I deal with my emotions, but I don’t let a lot of people in.

‘Christmas has changed for me. It’s no longer about lights or the sparkle, but about preserving joy for the child who is here, without letting her carry the weight of the sister she never met. I don’t make a big deal of losing Lorena to Larose. I don’t want her to grieve something she doesn’t understand.’

The moment that brought up the deepest emotion was this year’s anniversary of Lorena’s death, when the cast gathered to release balloons in her memory. ‘I didn’t cry on that day because I had Larose with me,’ remembers Lauren. ‘When you’re in mum mode, you’re strong.’ It was only later, when she sat with the TOWIE cast and actually spoke about the tragedy, that her grief surfaced. ‘It was really emotional, everyone was like, wow,’ she says, acknowledging that her TV family know her well enough for her to drop her guard. In fact, the day when the cast set aside old arguments and rivalries to come together to support her was one of the most important points in her healing.

‘Last year, for the anniversary, I was on my own with Larose in my garden. This year, the cast didn’t want that. So they organised a picnic and we did it together. It meant everything that Joe Blackman and Junaid Ahmed and Amy put their differences aside and we sat with each other in a circle. It made me feel loved, which is what I needed,’ she says.

Lauren has also found strength in therapy and hypnotherapy. ‘At first I was on autopilot, as a survival thing, I carried on being a mum. Now, I’m working on my anxiety with a guy on Harley Street – I can only be the best version of me if I help myself first.’

Despite her seemingly enviable celebrity lifestyle, Lauren has suffered from anxiety since 2011. It’s perhaps why she felt compelled to ‘enhance’ her appearance, something she now wants to leave behind. For her the New Year will mean a new look, which will undoubtedly come as a surprise to fans of her busty, bootylicious style.

She says, ‘I’m booked early next year to get my implants in my boobs removed. There’ll be no more, just an uplift, for natural, nice boobs. I haven’t had filler in four years and I’m actually going to be getting what’s left dissolved. My biggest regret is having surgery. I should never, ever have done it. I want to be me. I don’t want to be this person that I’m not.’

Fascinatingly, her return to TOWIE was for the same reason. ‘I came back to TOWIE because I had to find me again,’ she says simply. ‘It’s what I know.’

It takes a kind of alchemy – the right people, the right relationship dynamics and the right backdrop (in this case, Essex) to create a show that captures the zeitgeist as TOWIE did when it first aired. Initially it offered glorious escapism after the financial crisis of 2008 and the austerity politics that followed. Then, with its newly minted, straight-off-the-streets stars hogging the showbiz headlines, it acquired a life of its own. The ‘Essex’ look was easy to imitate, plus its stories about friendships, love affairs and family dust-ups were all universal, relatable themes. Fans could see people not unlike themselves becoming rich and famous simply by living out their ups and downs on TV.

As one of its founding stars, Lauren is TOWIE aristocracy, and so too is Amy Childs. Like Lauren, the 35-year-old has been part of the show since the very beginning – that’s been a decade and a half of neon nails, her big personality and even bigger heart.

Today she says it’s TOWIE that’s kept her sane – the routine, the friendships and the familiarity have proved to be the solution to the hectic business of raising four children by three different fathers. (For her, Christmas means celebration on an industrial scale for her blended family. On the day itself she’ll be taking everyone to a beautiful Essex restaurant; and on Boxing Day she’s hosting 38 people – ‘the whole clan,’ she laughs – at home.)

This year is one that has tested every inch of her resolve. She’s been trolled about everything from her appearance to her parenting choices. ‘Anyone in the public eye gets trolled – you can’t do anything right,’ she says calmly. ‘Back in the day, I didn’t ignore it because it was just so much, but now I do. They’re trolls, keyboard warriors. You’ve just got to be so strong.’

But even the strongest people crack, and Amy admits she has sought help. ‘I had therapy,’ she says quietly. ‘Sometimes it’s good to talk to somebody. It felt like a release.’ She isn’t ashamed of her vulnerability; if anything, she’s proud of it. ‘I’m very, very open to saying yes, I’ve had therapy. If I ever did need it again, I wouldn’t be embarrassed, I would ring up and ask.’

Amy’s much-commented-on weight-loss has become one of the year’s biggest talking points. After shedding around two stone, some fans feared she’d ‘gone too far’. She admits she did try a weight-loss jab about 18 months ago but stopped after it made her violently ill.

‘I now have a nutrition plan and I train three times a week. I go to padel and Pilates.’ The only downside has been the loose skin on her tummy. ‘When I lost so much weight, my skin was completely saggy, but I’ve been having 3D Refirm treatments every week (I’m on my tenth now). My belly is terrible but this treatment is unbelievable, and whereas before I’d never wear a bikini, next year when I go on holiday I’ll wear one.’

She may look fragile, perched birdlike on the sofa for the Weekend photoshoot, but she remains a formidable presence, both on the show and off, as she navigates motherhood, runs her multiple businesses and endures public scrutiny while trying to keep her health and family life intact. She gets that, she says, from her family and its work ethic.

‘My dad’s a workaholic. He’s 63, still works seven days a week, even on Christmas Day. It’s been drilled into us: you’ve got to really work for what you get. When I was 14, I was at a beauty salon, cleaning the toilets, scrubbing the floors, because I knew I wanted to do beauty.’

Back then she dreamed only of owning her own salon in Brentwood, her hometown; TV was never part of her career plan. ‘Owning the salon, that did actually happen. We made a lot of money. I’ve always worked,’ she shrugs, again giving lie to the idea that reality TV is candy floss that could be made by anybody.

The truth is that it can’t – old hands like Lauren and Amy just make it look easy.

Dan Edgar, now 35, didn’t join the show until 2015. That means he’s now had a decade in the TOWIE spotlight. This year, he finds himself navigating something most people would never have to face during the holidays: sharing a Christmas dinner scene with two former girlfriends – Amber Turner and Ella Rae Wise.

He shakes his head, half amused, half resigned. ‘Today I’ve got two ex-girlfriends at a Christmas dinner. It’s not a normal workplace,’ he says. ‘With Amber, we don’t speak; it’s just how it ended. With Ella, we’re cordial – we can chat. I’m a very relaxed, calm person but break-ups on camera are the hardest. When things go wrong, there is no retreat. You can’t escape it, and this has definitely tested me.’

The emotional toll of having your love life dissected publicly is something viewers rarely see. ‘Everything’s real,’ Dan reminds us. ‘I would have loved for it not to be because it would have made my life a lot easier.’

He’s become quietly passionate about men’s mental health, something that rarely makes the cut in glamorous TOWIE scenes. ‘It’s massively important. You bottle things up, it doesn’t do you any favours. You sit with your own thoughts, create problems in your head. Talking really helps,’ he says.

Plus, his own life is quieter now. He’s swapped club nights for early mornings, long sessions in the gym and keeping his head straight. ‘I still love a party, but I can’t deal with the aftermath. I need my head clear for work!’

As for the toxic masculinity and hard partying that TOWIE has sometimes been accused of promoting, he’s adamant the idea’s misguided. ‘I don’t know where it comes from. I presume people see the rows, and sometimes, if we’re at parties or in nightclubs, they presume that they’re the sort of natural things that come with it, like drugs,’ he suggests. ‘But it’s not a culture on the show, not at all. I don’t see or feel any of those things when I’m around these people, as I am day to day, for a lot of my life.’

Christmas, he says warmly, is a time that always brings him back to what matters. He glances around the set – the cast, the baubles, the comforting familiarity of TOWIE’s festive special and smiles. ‘This show has given me a great ten years; above all, it’s given me the gift of these friendships. If I could go back and do it all again, I would.’

And so when the cameras pause and the cast gathers, the room softens, and any friction fades in the glow of the fairy lights, the TOWIE cast becomes a family – a mismatched, battle-scarred one, but a family all the same. Lauren sums it up: ‘There is a lot more love than anything else.’ And this year in Essex, as everywhere at Christmas, that’s the message which matters.

• TOWIE’s Christmas Special, The Only Way Is Essexmas, is on December 8 at 9pm on ITV2 and ITVX.