Sun, sea, sand and superchavs: A ‘reality’ display about spray-tans and implants, The Only Way Is Essex is car-crash TV

Sun, sea, sand and superchavs: A ‘reality’ display about spray-tans and implants, The Only Way Is Essex is car-crash TV.

Not once have I felt so uncomfortable, so out of place, so old as I do at the moment. I sense pale, too. I stick out like a sore thumb: an unman cured, non-acrylic sore thumb.

I’m sitting on a white leather (what else?) banquette by a swimming pool at the Sisu ‘boutique’ inn in Marbella, viewing a tangle of brown limbs, jet black hair, gold accessories (bangles, sunglasses, shoes, bags), sequins and leopard-print.

It’s as though there’s been an explosion in a Primark warehouse.

Just to gain admission to this high-class ‘private party’, I have had to brave bouncers the size of buildings, whose looks look as though they’ve been carved out of rock.

My eyes upset, what with the Spanish sun high in the sky and the sheer number of gold coins dangling from the fringes of swimsuits.

And, oh dear me, the swimsuits! White ones, gold ones, pink ones. (There is a lot of pink, come to think of it.)

There are lots of young ladies with Rihanna-red hair, wearisome teeny denim shorts with the zip artfully left undone — the 21st century  version of leaving the laces of your trainers to trail in the mud.

There is barely an inch of flesh without a tattoo — the only evidence any of these persons can read.

There are young males, also, each stripped to the waist to reveal the sort of torso I thought you only found on expert boxers or David Beckham.

They all apparel Tom Cruise’s dark glasses, and are all well-oiled; add a dash of balsamic and they’d be a salad.

They all stand; the better to see and be seen. No woman seems to want to get splashed.

‘I’m anxious me ’air will get wet!’ shrieks one. Ah, now I recognize the accent. It hails from Brentwood in Essex, which is where I went to school.

Except this isn’t an Essex I recognize. Because I’m at a pool party given by the cast of The Only Way Is Essex, known to its mates as Towie.

And we’re not in Essex at all; we’re in Spain, because the cast have decamped to Marbella for their yearly summer jaunt, having prepared for months with their now infamous ‘no carbs before Marbs’ diet.

Aired on ITV2, Towie is a actuality show that has just finished its second series, and won a Bafta dual weeks ago: one voted for by viewers, but a Bafta nonetheless.

Towie follows the fortunes of a group of Essex boys and teenagers as they go about their everyday lives: driving around in white Range Rovers, getting their ’air done, celebrating, proposing to one another and chatting on various DFS sofas.