Why fan favourite Yvie Jones left Gogglebox
Yvie Jones became a household name without even leaving her loungeroom, thanks to Googlebox. But she and friend Angie Kent left the hit show due to the “extremely restrictive” rules the production placed upon them.
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When Yvie Jones and Angie Kent quit Gogglebox in December, the show’s executive producer David McDonald had one request: “Just don’t do any bloody reality TV.”
Jones replied: “As if. No one would want us.”
By February this year, Jones had come second on I ’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! and Kent fifth — the last two women standing.
Gogglebox had made the duo household names without them leaving their lounge room.
For Jones it was especially ironic.
In the mid-2000s, she worked in Channel 7’s Melbourne publicity team trying to get people to tune into shows like Desperate Housewives. Now she was famous for watching shows on TV.
Back in 2015, the Sydney-based housemates were original cast members of the Australian franchise of Gogglebox, a hit in the UK.
By series six, both were ready to leave due to the restrictive rules around the program, which airs on both Foxtel and Channel 10.
“We couldn’t endorse anything, we couldn’t tag anyone (on social media), there were no affiliations,” Jones says.
“I respect that, but cover us financially.
“There’s no appearance fee for being on the show, they don’t pay you — you get a location fee. Your house gets the fee. We were losing money.
“We were getting offers we weren’t able to take. It was extremely restrictive. It would have been fine had we been remunerated.”
Once they’d decided to quit Gogglebox, Jones, 46, and Kent, 28, hired separate talent managers.
“We thought there’d be separate futures for the both of us,” Jones explains.
“So we left the show with nothing planned. Had we known how much was out there and how wanted we were, we probably would have left a lot earlier.
“Saying that, we still miss Gogglebox. We still wish we could be a part of it. It’s such a shame we couldn’t come to some kind of agreement.”
A few days after their final Gogglebox shoot, Jones, Kent and Tom Hancock, their flatmate with Down syndrome whom they care for, went on holiday to Bali.
While there, Jones took a call offering her a slot on this year’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!
She declined, but said to pass the offer to Kent who would likely be keen.
“And they said, ‘No, we want both of you’, and I said, ‘OK, that changes things. Yeah, we’d do it if we can go in together’.”
It was a week after she’d told the Gogglebox EP no one would want them for a reality TV show.
“I’m a Celebrity was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life but the best decision I’ve ever made,” Jones says.
Since February, Jones has had only a single week without any media work, bouncing from the jungle to Studio 10 — “I’ve never met someone with such a thick skin as Kerri-Anne Kennerley, I can see why she’s been around for such a long time, nothing bothers her” — to her latest gig — filling in on Melbourne’s Fox FM hit breakfast show Fifi, Fev & Byron from next month when Fifi Box is on maternity leave.
Impressed by Jones’s work on Gogglebox and I’m a Celebrity, co-host Brendan Fevola
was the one who suggested she’d be the perfect replacement for Box.
“I didn’t know much about him before he was on I’m a Celebrity and I still don’t,” Jones says.
“The first thing I said when I met him was, ‘You’ve got four daughters’, and he said, ‘Yeah, how’s that for a karma train?’ and I didn’t get what that meant.
“People started to fill me in but I don’t want to know too much. I’m not going to Google him. He’s lovely to me.
“Byron (Cooke) is wonderful and Fifi is an icon. The only downside to this gig is not working with her. But the future is female, so they say …”
Jones has dabbled in radio, with occasional spots on mate Chris Bath’s Sydney show — but she feels she’s found her medium.
“Radio is a really good fit for me. TV is great as well, but radio is a little more forgiving. It doesn’t make you have body dysmorphia. Seeing yourself done up for TV, you start thinking, ‘Oh, this is how I look all the time’, and it’s not.”
While there are many radio teams who use modern technology to disguise the fact one member is in another state to the others, Jones is committing fully and moving to Melbourne after 12 years living in Sydney.
Her as-seen-on-TV dogs are coming with her, while Hancock will stay in Sydney. Kent moved back to Brisbane last year.
“I want to be a Melbourne girl again,” Jones says.
“I used to live in Fitzroy and I loved it. I could never find a good reason to get back here. It’s important to ensconce yourself in the culture of a city if you’re doing a radio show here, and it’s the best culture. I can actually start seeing some live music again, which Sydney is pathetic for.
“In Sydney, you’re just waiting to get into trouble for something. It’s embarrassing.”
PART of the brief of breakfast radio is getting personal, and over-sharing is something Jones has no problem with.
“I still pinch myself every day — am I that interesting? Do people really want to know that? Because if you want to know, I’ll tell you.
“I’ve had a million jobs. By the time I started working behind the scenes in TV, people told me constantly I was on the wrong side of the camera. And I’d be like, ‘Yeah, well, it’s too late now. I’m old.’
“For 20 years I was an out-of-work actor and singer who never made it. If I’d known I just had to be myself to make it and be so validated, I would’ve done it 20 years ago. But everything happens when it’s supposed to.
“I used to be playing other characters, but instead (during Gogglebox) I’ve been honing myself, getting a lot of therapy, dealing with
a lot of personal issues that have helped me become this vulnerable person that happens
to be extremely loved.”
After her stint in the jungle — where she was runner-up to gossip reporter Richard Reid — Jones realised her appeal was just being herself.
“Going to the jungle, I thought, ‘I’ll not fart, I’ll make sure my hair looks OK’. Within three days everyone is being themselves. I think I’m OK with me. I knew I was definitely irritating people in there.
“My therapist gave me all these mental and physical tools to deal with being around people for 24 hours a day. When I got out of the jungle, my therapist cried. She said I was so true to myself. She said she knows so much about me and she learnt so much more.”
Because she had gastric sleeve surgery in 2017, Jones had a special food exemption
on medical grounds. A defining moment for Jones on the show was when she refused to take part in the show’s usual public weigh-in.
She’d actually forgotten it was part of the format — “I was so deprived of food I could barely remember my surname, plus I thought I’d be first voted out” — and had to think on her feet when she found herself in front of a board with all the celebrities’ weights written on it.
“I was the highest weight, it was so difficult to see the crew and my cast mates seeing that.
I didn’t feel embarrassed, I felt supported, but it wasn’t their weight to tell.
“I don’t think the audience is stupid, they can see how much weight we’ve lost. It is about deprivation, you don’t need to do a weigh-in. Don’t make people feel less than.”
The weight board wasn’t shown on TV (at Jones’s request) and after Kent asked if she was OK, Jones said, “I didn’t sign up for The Biggest Loser’.
“The tears just started. (Campmates) Shane Crawford and Natasha Exelby just flanked me from cameras. The tears didn’t stop. The producers said, ‘Do you want to wait a while?’ and I told them, ‘This is not going away’.”
It was then Jones channelled both Oprah Winfrey and Eminem for a speech she thought might get her fired for breach of contract.
“It was my one shot. I was doing quick internal thinking, and I thought, even if they sack me and it doesn’t go to air, at least if one of the 50 crew listen, that’s fine. I’ve never been that nervous in my life, but I knew I had to keep speaking.”
Jones explained how she’d lived with an eating disorder for most of her life, had grown up in a house where being overweight was one of the worst things you could be, and couldn’t remember the last time she’d weighed herself.
“I wish we lived in a different world where what we look like doesn’t matter,” she said on the show.
“Unless you’ve had an overweight problem, you don’t know what it’s like to go through life and be judged solely on the weight that you are or the clothes that don’t fit you properly.
“We’re going to celebrate how much weight we’ve lost and that somehow is something to be proud of and I don’t think it is. It has nothing to do with the way you look, what your worth is in the world.”
Jones excluded herself from the challenge, and the speech got a major reaction in Australia and internationally.
“I had no idea it was going to be shown or have the response it would have,” she says.
“I’m so proud of it. I’d like to think it changes the future of that show a little bit. It’s only just airing in New Zealand now and I’m getting all messages from mainly wonderful women and gay men. There’s a new influx of these messages, which are also heartbreaking — I wish I wasn’t getting any — saying how much they relate to what I said. I don’t think in my lifetime we’ll see a huge change …”
Jones says she’s been single “for a long time, by choice” but is open to changing that.
“I’m not looking for anything specific, just a really great guy,” she says.
“I didn’t realise they go pretty early and the women that have them are not letting them go. I should have learned that earlier. All my friends’ husbands are fantastic. There is a lot of s--- out there. I have no f---s left to give. No time. I’m happy to be single, but I’d absolutely love to fall in love and meet an awesome human that I can share my heart with — not give my heart to — and share theirs. I’d love that.
“But if it doesn’t happen, it’s not meant to. I do think I need to get a little more proactive about it. Maybe I can put a call out on the radio show, meet someone in Melbourne?”
Kent is about to film the new series of The Bachelorette, a show she and Jones used to blast on Gogglebox.
“Oh, we used to pay out on that show — especially when anyone would kiss, we’d make all those noises,” Jones laughs.
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“Last week I said to Angie, ‘What am I going to do on the couch by myself when I’m watching and you’re kissing someone?’ and
she said, ‘I will have filmed it all by then so I’ll hopefully be watching on the couch with you’.
“In all seriousness, I asked her not to kiss anyone until the very end. It’s like seeing your mum and dad kissing. I don’t want to see a tongue. She told me her mum told her the same thing. Be the girl that just doesn’t kiss until you get to the last four.
“She said, ‘We’ll see, Yvie, it’s not about you and your needs’. I have a lot of disdain for that franchise, but I see why people go on it. And
in this country, it’s got a good track record for couples and weddings and even babies.
“And if I don’t get to go into that Bachelorette house to help Angie make some decisions, heads are going to roll!”
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