First published in The Times on 6 November 2023
It’s hard to imagine that any of Britain’s showbiz types — raised on reality shows, Hello! magazine shoots and fast-fashion sponsorship — may possibly be capable of joining the country’s most elite military unit. If any celeb was made for the gig, however, it might just be Gareth Gates.
This may surprise you if you are remembering Gates the sweet-faced, 17-year-old runner-up of the ITV talent show Pop Idol, who dominated the tabloids and charts of the early 2000s. Now, however, Gates is 39 and a daily gym-goer. He looks like Superman with a tan.
What makes him a great candidate for the SAS, though — or at least for the Channel 4 show Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins — is not just his powerful upper body. It is also not simply that he isn’t Matt Hancock, a man whose relentless arrogance on the show resulted in him being tied up in the rain with a bag over his head. (This despite Hancock earning begrudging respect from his former special forces interrogators for one thing: “The reality is, he’s really good at lying.”) No, what is particularly impressive about Gates is his ability to manage highly stressful situations. Interviewing him over Zoom, the mettle he has developed in this department couldn’t be clearer.
Born in Bradford in 1984, Gates lives with a severe stammer, and for more than two decades has done so in the public eye. He brings a speech coach with him to interviews: Chris Cooksey is on our call today, and the two of them work together as though Gates is an athlete and Cooksey is honing his game.
At one point Gates pauses our conversation and says haltingly, “Chris, will you monitor this? I’m going to go to five words per breath — simply because I’m finding it hard, and I want my answers to be eloquent.” With this reset and a pep talk from the coach, we move forward slowly but steadily, Gates pausing every five words to breathe and think ahead.
It must take enormous discipline, determination and courage to do media interviews and performances with this difficulty — and as it happens, those are the qualities the nation has just seen from Gates on Celebrity SAS.Last night he won the latest series of the show, or, to use the official lingo, he was the only recruit to pass training.
The format is that a bunch of reality TV stars, sportspeople, comedians, musicians and so on are whipped into shape by military training — culminating in a mock capture and interrogation that looks deeply unpleasant and frightening. “The thing that really shocked me is how it’s fully immersive,” Gates says. “I was expecting after a difficult challenge for them to yell, ‘And cut,’ and for us to have a little bit of time to get our breath back — but no, they treat you like it’s an actual selection process.”
The series was filmed in Vietnam, and at one point three of the recruits collapsed after a demanding hiking exercise in 43C heat; they had to be sent home. The whole point of the show is to test their endurance, but watching it, I questioned how responsible it is to do that just for entertainment.
Gates defends it, however — he felt well looked after. “You could quite easily walk around the camp and think you were alone,” he says. “But when three people went down and their eyes were rolling in the back of their heads, about thirty medical staff came out of absolutely nowhere. At that point we realised how many people were on hand in case the worst was to happen.”
By the end of the series 13 of the 16 celebrities had either given up, failed to keep up or been discharged on medical grounds. The last ones standing were Gates, the model Danielle Lloyd — who as a young woman suffered years of serious abuse by her partner at the time — and the former health secretary.
You probably don’t need a refresher on his story. “You know, me, Danielle and Matt — we’ve all been through hard times,” Gates says. “We’ve had the weight of the world on our shoulders — the weight of the country on Matt’s. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the three of us made it to the end.”
If you aren’t a fan of Hancock’s, you may have particularly enjoyed the penultimate episode, in which “interrogators” held him hostage and gave him a spectacular dressing-down, calling him “Mr F***ing Know-It-All” and a “weasel-faced c***”. This provocation is supposed to test a recruit’s ability to stay calm and survive — but in Hancock’s case there was an undeniable air of schadenfreude.
An expert on the show observed that in a real interrogation Hancock’s desire to “win every verbal spat — can’t help himself” would get him beaten up, whereas what worked in Gates’s favour is his likeability. To harm him would feel “like kicking a puppy”.
Gates is typically diplomatic about Hancock. “Beforehand I only knew what I’d seen in the papers,” he says. “I think some of us felt let down by the government, and I’m not just talking about Matt. There were things that we were asked to do, which, you know, didn’t play out in their own lives.”
He is referring, obviously, to the breaches of social distancing guidelines. “But the show was a leveller. It didn’t matter who you were — the DS [directing staff, who led the training] didn’t care, and after a few minutes we didn’t care. That was really quite liberating — you had to prove your worth in that particular situation.”
Hancock, who does not look like Superman, did remarkably well in lasting the course, but the chief instructor, Billy Billingham, and the DS team (Jason Fox, Rudy Reyes and Chris Oliver) were repeatedly irritated by his lack of humility. While every other celebrity at some point expressed fear and self-doubt, he appeared to stay cocky and emotionally impenetrable. “I think it was hard for him to let his guard down at first,” Gates says carefully. “He probably felt like he had something to prove. But I think I got to know Matt. You can’t hold any façade up in those types of environments. He’s a human being and he’s probably made mistakes, but haven’t we all?”
As a teenager Gates had his own embarrassments. Thanks to Pop Idol he became very famous indeed, had four No 1 singles and sold five million albums. Infamously, when the glamour model Katie Price told the tabloids she’d had a relationship with him, he denied it; several years later he admitted she had been telling the truth. The press coverage around him seems particularly seedy now, looking back from a world in which the tabloids are somewhat more restrained. I’m struck by how utterly disorientating and stressful the sudden attention must have been.
Gates shrugs. “Pop Idol was the first of its kind, well before the likes of The X Factor, and so I don’t think anybody knew exactly what to expect,” he says. “I didn’t ever want to be famous — fame terrifies me because of my speech. If you’re well known you’re approached by people, you have to converse with them, you have to do interviews and that’s the last thing I ever wanted. But I knew I had a talent, and being able to sing meant everything to me, because I wasn’t able to talk.”
In one of the most moving moments of Celebrity SAS Gates told the DS about the “unbearably bad” bullying he endured as a child. “That was the hardest point of the show for me,” he says now. “I bared scars and spoke of trauma in my childhood that I don’t think I’ve ever spoken about before. I’m no longer that cowering schoolboy, so I had to prove to myself I’m stronger, but I also wanted to show people with any sort of affliction that you don’t have to let that dictate who you are.” He has had a huge volume of supportive messages from viewers.
His 14-year-old daughter, Missy (from his marriage to the actress Suzanne Mole; they separated in 2012), watched it too: “I was a bit concerned about her seeing that side of Daddy, but actually it’s brought us even closer.”
Missy sometimes travels with Gates, as does his mother when he is booked to perform on cruises — a frequent gig for him these days. In fact he is joining our call from a ship that is headed to the Caribbean; his girlfriend, Allana Taylor, another actress, is going with him this time.
Although he’s less intensely famous than he was 20 years ago, he seems to be continuously working: he does panto every year, will soon star in a touring production of The Best of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and has written a musical, Speechless, that is set to open in the West End in 2025.
Two decades after being runner-up on Pop Idol, he’s clearly delighted to have won Celebrity SAS. Billingham and the DS team, who judge the recruits, are all former special forces operatives. “We’re just there creating a TV show, but this is what they’ve had to do for real, and that, for me, was eye-opening,” he says. “I had huge respect for these guys who protect us as a country.” Billingham told him that he was the only celebrity that they would feel safe working alongside in conflict.
Gates maintains that he didn’t know he could last the course. “I go into any new group feeling very weak, not being able to join in on fun conversations,” he says. “I tend to suffer in silence, and that’s hard — I have a lot to say but I don’t have the opportunity. And so I never expected to be the only one that passed. I thought I was quite weak inside because of everything I’ve been through.” He pauses, catches his breath. “Turns out, I’m a bit more resilient than I thought.”