In Search of Something Real With the Cast of 'Geordie Shore'

Thing about looking at famous people close up is you are immediately impressed with how good-looking they are. They are so good-looking. They are five times better looking than normal good-looking people are, minimum. You think you're good-looking, don't you, or you know a handsome friend, and you think you know what good-looking is, and then you get up close to a famous person and there is this just magnetism, this out-through-their-face energy about them, and you can get up as close as you like and peer at them like an eye doctor, but no, they are different, a better breed: no imperfections, no pores, light glimmers off them in a different way, teeth so white they glow. Here is something you do not know about Kyle from Geordie Shore: Kyle from Geordie Shore smells fantastic. I mean this: Kyle from Geordie Shore is an incredible-smelling man. And the smell pervades, travels with him, lasts all day. There is a scent around him like an aura. How does Kyle from Geordie Shore smell so good? I can only assume that MTV sent him and the rest of the cast to a scent-applying workshop, and Kyle from Geordie Shore just really paid attention. It was a one-day thing, you know. They got a professional perfumer up from Harrods or somewhere up to Newcastle, and Kyle from Geordie Shore is like: "Well I'm paying fucking attention to this, like!" Kyle from Geordie Shore is out here making notes. Kyle from Geordie Shore marking his pulse points. They are all in a big boardroom in some northern MTV-issue office, glass walls and a bunch of bottles of Cool Water in the centre of a desk island, and a perfumer is just slowly explaining to gilded geordies how to smell nice. And they paid attention, because that is their job. It is not a push to say Kyle from Geordie Shore's job – his literal job – is to smell really good.

On this basis, Kyle from Geordie Shore is exceptionally good at his job. He is the Michael Jordan of doing his job. He is the Lionel Messi of smelling like a cloud of velvet musk. Only: it's very hard, really, to put your finger on what that job is, exactly. Even if you asked him, you feel, held him down by the shoulders and inhaled his brilliant scent, even if you looked into his white veinless eyes and shouted, "KYLE," you shouted, "KYLE FROM GEORDIE SHORE: WHAT IS YOUR JOB?", even if you did all that, you feel, he would not truly know. Kyle from Geordie Shore's job is just… to be Kyle from Geordie Shore. Everyone from Geordie Shore's job is just… is just to be from Geordie Shore.

Ask them what they do. Aaron: "The job is being yourself." Nathan: "Just being very social and attending events." Jay: "Just focus on my tan." Dan: "Mainly a lot of promotion work for different companies." Holly: "I have no idea." Dan: "I was meant to be out in Australia and Bali, but I just cancelled it to get on it every single night." Sophie: "I went and did a normal life, I opened my own shop." Chloe: "Appearances. I've just come off my tour in Australia but I'm going back to Australia." Marty: "I've got loads of deals, like jeans." Kyle: "I do PAs, club appearances. I've done some radio." Marnie: "I just sit and watch my Netflix and just do nothing. It's the best thing." Scotty: "Mate, I'm so busy it's ridiculous. I do probably more PAs like club appearances than all of them put together." Gaz: "I've got four businesses. One year I did 280 club appearances in a year." What they do is, technically, nothing: their job is to do the thing we all do to escape our jobs. But they do it so much – so relentlessly – that it becomes something large, inescapable. And there's this weird duality to it, too: the Geordies cannot go to a club and get pissed to escape their reality as people who go to clubs and get pissed. "When I go out with my mates," ten-season veteran James says, "I spend most of the night talking to people rather than talking to my friends." To them, getting a shotboard of Corky's in and getting off wetly with someone at a nightclub is a busman's holiday. There is no escape from the party. There is no escape from being themselves.

I am in Newcastle, and Kyle from Geordie Shore is smelling aggressively good at me. I am in Newcastle, trying to seek the deep truth at the heart of Geordie fame.

§

Have you ever been on a party bus in the middle of the day? Actually, let's scratch that back and re-ask it: have you ever been on a party bus, full stop? A party bus is a bus that likes to party. There are LED strip lights between the stiff beige curtains of the bus and the blacked-out windows around it. There are two benches the length of the party bus that allow passengers to travel safely at high speed and wind their batties at low. There is a circular plinth with hard-wearing champagne flutes embedded in it and absolutely no champagne. Every available surface is made of the kind of rough, grey carpet-type material they floor juvenile offenders' institutes with. It smells of a thousand spilled drinks, a million artless fingerings. The party bus smells like the worst nightclub you have ever been in, only more condemned. Turn off the keys to the party bus and let it settle, and as you heard oil tinker through the engine, small gears whirring to a halt, you'll hear it: the ghosts of a £25-a-head hen party, all shouting "UP THE BUM, NO BABIES".

The driver of our party bus is called Peter, and he does not know how to control the music. "My name's Peter," Peter says, "and all you need to know is: I do not control the music." Peter does not appear to have the requisite number of visible front teeth. Peter does not believe in the fine art of braking. Peter very nearly crashes the party bus into an actual, non-party bus. The music is louder than I imagine death can be. Previously I imagined death being every unsaid word, every whisper, every decision you never made, ever sin you committed and every bullet you dodged, screamed back at you in a hail of light and noise. Now I know that death is nothing. Now I am listening to Timber on a daytime party bus to South Shields.

The party bus is just an amuse bouche on my tightly inventoried day of Geordie Shore fame. Today, I am a famous Geordie. Today, I am wearing a T-shirt that says 'TASH ON TOURS'. I am in a party bus, essentially a panic attack on wheels. People take party buses when a normal cab won't give them enough of a headache to properly march into a nightclub with. People take party buses when they want to escape a part of themselves that can't die. I am taking one to Sophie Kasaei's dad's restaurant, Mambo Wine & Dine. When I step off the party bus I am immediately hit with a paparazzi flashbang. This is what fame feels like. This is what Geordie fame feels like.

Up until now, it's easy to confuse the life of a famous Geordie for a prisoner at Guantanamo, tossed from one baffling torture to another, taking brief moments out from their tight schedule of being virulently waterboarded to pout for a member of the public's selfie, a quick hair-check in the mirror, crouching down into shot, knowing they are in the artless and untrained hands of an amateur selfie taker, knowing every molecule of their Geordie body has to strain against a baffling from-under-the-chin angle or absence of decent light to look attractive, somehow, to beam like light within a cave, so that the Daily Star won't get hold of it, that their personal brand won't be tainted. But then perhaps I am over-egging the trauma of the party bus.

Mambo Wine & Dine is what would happen if someone opened an affordable-premium Mediterranean restaurant in pre-revolution France, and then somehow – with cranes and a time machine – moved the thing wholesale to a grey bit near some busy roads in South Shields. The ceilings are ornately stuccoed and the colour scheme is rich red and washed-out yellow. There is marble or marble-effect incorporated into every surface. Standing pot plants, thrice-cooked chips. High black tables next to bar stools and halloumi selections served on wooden boards. Nathan from Geordie Shore drinks an ornate green cocktail out of a detailed glass boot. Sophie Kasaei's father, a sweet tiny man called Keivan, oversees every detail, every hanging kebab platter grill, before crushing my hand like a bear trap with a farewell handshake. Along with 11 other journalists, we are here to sit on perilously high black bar stools and speed date with the cast of Geordie Shore. We're here to touch the cloth of reality fame, tash on with the hem.

It's been five years since Geordie Shore hit our screens, and a lot has changed. Watch back the first series and you can see why it attracted public outcry, middle class groans and sight unseen eyerolls. It was trying too hard to be Jersey Shore; the cast were as unpolished as the production was; it's essentially just six episodes of girls loudly crying in nightclub stairwells and hard hench boys taking them out for a single glass of wine at a Yates's and a chat about "what's going on with us"; everyone's accent is really hard to understand, to the point where it turns me into a tin-hat conspiracy theorist, yelling that "MTV must have imposed elocution lessons on them! They must have done lessons!" at the screen; there's this bizarre combination of soundtrack mix and grainy footage greenscreen backgrounding that just makes the whole thing feels like a come up and a come down at the same time; it's weirdly quaint, so people pull by writing phone numbers down, and barely if ever shag clatteringly beneath duvets on infrared camera. Not so much has changed now, but there's this imperceptible polish: a certain Geordieness has been strained out of the central cast, replaced with a sheen of fame; all of the girls have transformed into contoured supermodels and the boys all have their own ornately designed T-shirt line; the lighting is much better in the house. And, of course, the cast are now in this riptide of sort of self-fulfilling fame: they are famous for going to nightclubs and getting pissed, and then they go to nightclubs and get pissed, where their fame brings in more people, begging like believers over the velvet rope of the VIP area, and the cast may deign to select a convert from the crowd, and bless them my child, and take them home and shag them; they are known for being good at pulling but are now good at pulling because they are known for being good at pulling. Don't you see? Don't you see that nothing is real anymore?

I am trying to grapple the nature of reality with Jay, the wise old maester of the Geordie Shore house, Jay already 30, Jay done with this life of reality-for-the-sake-of-reality. Peering into the mind of Jay is a curious study in stoic post-fame: Jay left the show after three seasons of trying and failing to bang Vicky, leaving after the infamous Cancun trip, leaving by announcing, "Guys: this is my last night" to a picnic table full of half-pissed, pink-from-the-sun Geordies, as if solemnly announcing his impending death, Jay leaving to spend time with his serious, outside-of-the-house girlfriend, which is Geordie Shore is as close as you can get to death without actually dying, RIP Jay, Toplad. He came back briefly in season seven and again now for the five-year anniversary series, but seems tired with a life cycle of tashing on and necking shots, tashing on and necking shots. "I think there's about one [season] left in me," Jay says, resigned to his fate. "One more, maximum." If this sounds like the whining of an especially hench princeling, think again: on TV, Jay's job is to tash on, to neck shots. Outside of TV: his job is to tash on and neck shots. It does not matter where Jay goes or what he does – he has a tan range, a protein endorsement, a gymwear line in the works – the backbone of the Jay economy is going to clubs and tashing on and necking shots, a for-hire glimpse of the Geordie Shore lifestyle doled out in single evening units at various satellite towns. He never for a second stops being Jay from Geordie Shore. If Jay from Geordie Shore isn't feeling very Jay from Geordie Shore tonight, he has to pretend to be. "Mate I've been asleep in the back of the taxi and the promoter's been like, 'Is Jay going to be alright?' I've got into a PA and had 20 minutes to jump on the mic, I've literally been pouring vodka and Red Bull in a glass, drinking it, before you know it I'm on the stage and got energy. Four or five minutes later I'm like, 'Come on!' It's false energy. It just keeps you going." If you have the money and the nightclub for him to do it in, you can pay Jay to stop being tan magnate Jay Gardner and instead be Jay from Geordie Shore, sucking vodka-soda-lime through a straw, aeroplaning a single hand through the air in time to six consecutive Calvin Harris songs, stooping into frame to take nightclub photos with large groups of girls, not leaving until you let him, not leaving until 3am. Pay Jay Gardner from Geordie Shore an appearance fee and you can keep him partying on Red Bull fumes, partying as your prisoner.

The idea that Geordie Shore Geordies have a difficult job is a misnomer, but they do have a relentless one: and, possibly weirder, it's one they can't really escape. Like: where do you go once you've pissed yourself on MTV? What happens when you've had a fitness DVD and your own protein bar, but then the party's over? What then? For Daniel 'Dan' Tuck-Thomas, the answer is Zante, Magaluf, then Zante again. Dan's post-Shore life is the usual get-on-a-stage-and-wave, T-shirt-cannon-into-the-crowd drinking-contest-compere thing, but there was a moment there – after three seasons on the show and a season in Zante, staring down the barrel of a normal life at 20 after a taste of something more – that he thought about going back to the normal 9 to 5. "I faced it, yeah. The thing is when you come back from the season, after five months of drinking all the time, and you come back and your body is ruined and you think, 'I need to sort myself out here'." He pauses. "Then you sort yourself out and you're like, 'Nah!'" Jay, a former quantity surveyor, has a similar attitude to the grind. "I couldn't go back there. I couldn't. Your head after you've been doing this kind of stuff for four or five years, your head's just, like… out of it. Even trying to think about something is like…" His hands make a gesture like an explosion. "Pffffffftht."

A crowd is amassing outside Mambo Wine & Dine – an all-ages combination of tiny Geordie boys perched on bikes, trying to get a look; photographers both amateur and not in bodywarmers and holding DSLRs, trying to get a press shot; pre-teen girls eating sweets; mums and older sisters, arms huddled against the wind, cheerfully Snapchatting every moment of anticipation. What they are truly waiting for is the moment the twelve cast members inside march outside in a line and pile into a party bus waiting nearby: this moment is still two hours away. In the mean time, Scotty T gives a 12-year-old boy £20 to nip to the shops for him, and he races to a Londis on his BMX, coming back panting with a pack of Benson & Hedges. Why, you think, would you want to give this up.

§

The new guy is Marty, although he doesn't like being called the new guy, because he did his first tranche of filming months ago, months before he hit the actual screen, he has already been on the piss for weeks, mate, give him his due. And then as he's explaining it to me, there's this pure, naked moment of realness, where he forgets the order of the months:

And again:

In the party bus to Mambo's, there was some discussion about how real the Geordies were: was all the partying an act, were they dumb on purpose, did they really throw drinks at each other and legitimately use the word "pure" as an adverb, does anyone, really, piss themselves that much; where do screen Geordies end and real world Geordies begin? Are mortal Geordies and sober Geordies two sides of the same coin? And the answer, when you see Marty from Geordie Shore very honestly and legitimately forget which month comes before December – twice, recall, he forgot this information twice in extremely quick succession – is that yes, they are real: they are the most straightforward reality TV stars in the business, and that is surely the core reason for their success; that you cannot truly synthesise pure, MTV-ready Geordieness; that it cannot be trained, acted or taught, it cannot be won and it cannot be lost. They all just possess that unbottleable something. Just so surely as December probably follows November, the Geordies will get up and get on it.

§

"I'm not this type of lad, like a fame-hungry kid. I'm me and I've been myself and I haven't gone out my way to try get to the top: I've just done what I've done everyday and I've got to where I am." Scotty T is explaining the commercial allure of Scotty T. It essentially boils down to 'be Scotty T'. "Everyone's like, 'Have you changed?' No, I'm still a little lunatic from Newcastle." Scotty's lost his voice from the sheer exertion of being Scotty T – Celebrity Big Brother winner, Ex on the Beach participant, Geordie Shore lynchpin, Boohoo model, burgeoning radio star, Ellie Goulding's drinking partner. He's croaking about how busy he is, how he never stops, he sleeps in cabs and naps in hotels before going out to nightclubs to wave and make an appearance, how he's only spent about two weeks in Newcastle this calendar year. "Sometimes it gets annoying when I wanna be at home. Like, I missed one of my best mate's birthdays, but I've got to be somewhere." Scott prides himself on his professionalism: he's never late to an early morning photoshoot, an interview, a film call; he's never late to an occasion where he's being paid to get pissed and flirt with birds. He's, also, keenly aware that his life is some sort of magnificent joke. "Don't overthink it," he says, locking me with a look that says 'I know you are going to write 5,000 words about today. I know you are going to overthink it.' "At the end of the day I can't really complain about the job because it's fucking easy, isn't it. It's fun. It's a fucking dream job." I'm still no nearer to knowing exactly what that job actually is.

§

I ask Marty what his DMs are like. I tell him he can answer this question off the record if he wants to. He does not want to answer it off the record. He gestures my Dictaphone. "Ah, mate, keep that on there, honestly." He looks off into middle distance. "It's just fanny pictures and shit." A fond pause. "Do you know on Instagram, how you can accept all the DMs? It was just fannies and that, tits. I wasn't accepting them all, either." In the cannon of the show, he has been famous for exactly a fortnight. He has more pictures of fannies and tits than he knows what to do with, has time to even process.

One person nearing the end of being done with fannies and tits is Holly Hagan, Geordie Shore's shapeshifting sirenlike OG. In the first season she was all clotted fake lashes and inelegantly hoisting moves to keep her boobs up in their bra, shouting and sobbing and shagging in Jacuzzis; now, five years and 12 seasons and about six post-fame makeovers later, she's like a Jessica Rabbit made out of delicate clay, upright and too afraid to move until she falls apart into a hundred shards. She's also a kind of sui generis of the Geordie Shore 12-season fame boom-and-bust: at 23, she's bizarrely mature, as if reality TV has took her from youthful excess right through Yung Fame and into a thick patch of enervation, a kind of to-the-bones listlessness. After Big Birthday Battle, you sense that, like Jay, she hasn't got many years of Geordie Shore left in her. "I'll stay on for as long as I've got a reason to be there, and right now I don't really have a reason to be there. If it was like [Big Birthday Bash] forever, I'd stay until I'm 40. But it is difficult to say, 'I want to stay forever' because I don't enjoy it much any more." Purpose is a curious thing in the Geordie Shore house: the whole point was there wasn't any, that it was eight young people escaping jobs as quantity surveyors and call centre workers to trade in for a kind of nü-fame, but now they've all got side hustles and outsider boyfriends and their personal appearances and their contour kits, and sitting in a house for six weeks having 42 consecutive hangovers loses its lustre. "Everyone's got their own little twosome, their own little couples, and I'm just sat there like, 'What should I do?' But I have no idea [what my plan for the future is]. Everyone's like, 'What's your plan?' and it's like, 'I haven't had a plan for the last 5 years and it's gone alright, so I'm just going to wing it I think.'"

Kyle – Holly's ex, banned from the previous series for getting off with too many girls on a the S11 trip to Greece and pissing everyone off – is the only Geordie Shore castmember actively playing a character, a kind of pantomime dickhead, Dick Dastardly if Dick Dastardly wore his own range of T-shirts and caps. "I embrace it," Kyle shrugs, smelling amazing. "If MTV wants someone to hate, I'll be the one they make hate." But does the negativity get to him? The tweets, the people in the street? "The night I got into them two girls [in the Greek episode where… listen, it's a long story, in an episode in Greece when he gets into two girls], I got so much hate, I was having about 500 arguments at once. I swear down, I stayed up all night going through my Twitter, arguing with each person one-by-one." But does that not get to him? Can he not rise above it? Does he like being MTV's dickhead puppet? "It's funny, innit?"

I ask Nathan what the gang's WhatsApp groups are called – as the house's leading bisexual, he is at once one of the guys and one of the girls, a vital bridge between the two sexes, the underappreciated glue that holds the GS family together. He goes in his bag, gets his phone. Puts his passcode in, finds WhatsApp. He squints at the screen. "The lads one is called, 'Lads'," he says. And the girl's one? "'Girls'." I decide right there that Nathan is the best one in the show.

§

There is a moment when I go into the ornate Mambo bathroom and Jay is there, half-partying, getting just a hint of that drunk lean despite it being about 4pm, and even though he was only speaking to me ten minutes before I'm not 100% sure he remembers me, his eyes and groomed eyebrows give nothing away, all he knows from my Tash On Tours T-shirt and lack of spraytan is that I am a journalist, and he asks me what I'm planning to do that night and I say "go out", and he says some amalgam of the words "wey" and "wahey" and wishes me a good night, and I think: that was nice, of Jay, to do that. And then I realise: Jay just did his job at me. And, lo, I am sucked into the vortex. And, lo, I desire to get mortal. That unknowable Geordie Shore witchcraft – that sprinkle of Geordie magic – patently works. I leave the bathroom and do a shot.

At one point Marnie throws a sweet at Kyle, who pauses my interview with him to riposte, "Oi, that hit me right on the bellend, that!" And I'm pretty sure it did. I'm pretty sure it did hit him on the bellend. But god. Sometimes: sometimes don't you think you'd get tired of girls throwing sweets at your bellend?

Nobody has mentioned that former sort of castmember Joel Corry is there, with his arms like wood, his face harder than any face I've ever seen, I find no man more threatening on earth than Joel Corry, I would rather go a round with Mike in his prime than be stuck in a lift with Joel Corry on the radge, face like a shark, eyes glassy and fearless, arms again like actual trees, varnished trees, huge horrible arms, freakish arms, and he is just there, DJing. Twelve journalists and 12 Geordie Shore cast members sit in party hats and consume hanging kebab skewers while Joel Corry sleevelessly played bangers from a high plinth. The sun is still shining outside. This is what it feels like to be a famous Geordie. You are never allowed to stop partying, not even in the afternoon.

We move on, through the assembled crowds, back through dappled dying onto the infernal party bus. And there, something miraculous happens: there is this tangible moment when the mood flips and the Geordies start to party. Consider: 26 people crammed into a 15-seater party bus, and everyone is half-pissed, maybe more, and Chloe – the new girl, who looks like she is slowly turning in to a very glamorous human cat – decides to start grinding, and then Chantelle joins in, and then Nathan's in the middle drinking prosecco straight from the bottle, and there is the accompanying screeching and shouting that comes with this sort of thing, Timber's going, and Peter is doing that thing where he doesn't like braking again and for anyone else this would be the night of their lives – this is chaos, this would be the moment they treasure above all, that time they almost died in a party bus having a big ol' lesbian grind, this is the time they tell their kids about – but for the Geordie Shore lot this is just Tuesday, this is just them doing the press for the new series. Nothing feels insincere, though. Like: Chloe is getting so appalling with her grinding that the PR has to ask the photographer to delete photos of it happening, but nothing feels insincere. I am in the eye of a Geordie Shore party storm. It's real.

The vibe continues into the VIP section of the nightclub we are driven to, where the cast of Geordie Shore – Aaron, James, Dan, Jay, Chloe, Chantelle, Gaz, Kyle, Marty, Holly, Marnie, Sophie, Nathan, Scotty T, plus Anna the boss, plus a few security guards, plus four PRs and at least one journalist per castmember – are crammed behind a single velvet rope, spread drinking free beers and vodka across three booths, living it up, Very Important People, a taste of the high life, popping bottles, getting papped, table service, and then staring out across the empty dancefloor at the only other two people in the club, a boy and a girl who seem to be on the worst first date in the entire world, looking furiously on at us, just furious. This continues for about 15 minutes of oblivious drinking until, noticeably, the club starts to fill: just like a crowd formed outside Mambo's Bar and Grill earlier in the day, so Newcastle's nightlife crowds en masse around its famous sons and daughters, moths around a flame. The cast of Geordie Shore are famous for partying, but they are also famous for partying, if that makes any sense. They are their own draw, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Carve it in the ancient stones, in clumsy Geordie runes: 'AND LO, THE CAST OF GEORDIE SHORE SHALL COME HERE, AND THEY SHALL GET MORTAL, AND THEN AT LEAST 200 PEOPLE WILL TURN UP TO WATCHETH THEM FALL OVER AND FLAP THEIR PANTS OUT, AND PAY £8 ENTRY EACH FOR THE PRIVILEGE.'

Fundamentally, the cast of Geordie Shore are so beloved because they remind us of people we know: the girls who cry in nightclubs; the boys who ramp up their pulling abilities and then, when confronted with the threat of conversation with an actual human woman, go all shy and weird and just go and hang out in the smoking area alone; the lads who wear T-shirts with no jacket and put their arms around each other and shout "LET'S FUCKING GET ON IT THEN" and then proceed to fucking get on it; the pants-pissers. I came to Newcastle expecting some fractured disconnect between the Geordie Shore excess we see on screen and the human bodies tasked with doing it, that what we see on TV was some caricature of British nightlife, character actors playing enhanced roles, people who know what November is pretending they don't, but no: nothing is forced, nothing is hollow, they genuinely, unprovoked, get up and grind to nothing and nearly clatter each other to death on hard corners in party buses. At 11pm I am forced to leave because I thought I was better at drinking than I was and it turns out I can barely stand up, but the cast are still there, chatting and flirting, drinking through straws, leaning in and listening dutifully when strangers come up and touch their wrist and pull them close and say, 'I love you, on TV, the way you get drunk and shag'. By contrast I have lost my jacket and am cold. They are soldiers primed for an eternal war against the mighty forces of sambuca.

One night of being on the Geordie Shore party bus was enough for me. As I leave the nightclub, coatless, I gaze backwards one last time and I'm struck by the weird nobility of it all: in an industry that has turned them into partybots, the cast of Geordie Shore still fundamentally know how to stay real, get mortal, to have a good time, keep their jackets about them at all times, to stay upright and cogent after 11pm, to smell fantastic deep into the night. I go back to the hotel and eat a box of sugar cookies with Charlotte Crosby's face on them that a PR left for me. The cast stay out, doing their jobs but not doing their jobs, at once mortal and not, drunk but not drunk. They still have love for the game, even after half a decade of getting on it. This is the life they lead. I am unutterably wrecked. This, to them, was just their duty. This was just a Tuesday.

@joelgolby

Geordie Shore: Big Birthday Battle is on Tuesdays on MTV at 10pm

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