As Joey Essex turns 34 and is dumped from Love Island, why I can’t help but compare him to Prince Harry
After watching the BBC documentary Joey Essex: Grief and Me, why the King of reality TV and Prince Harry have an obvious but tragic similarity.
It wasn’t until watching both ITV’s Tabloids on Trial featuring Prince Harry last week and then seeing the BBC documentary Joey Essex: Grief and Me at the weekend that I thought about their inextricable link. Although they obviously come from vastly different worlds, they have both experienced the tragic loss of their mothers at a tender age and both still seem to be unable to come to terms with it many years later.
Joey Essex was only ten years old when his mother tragically took his own life and in the documentary Joey Essex: Grief and Me, he discusses that in order to move forward with his future, he has to confront his past, and the passing of his mother that ripped his life apart. In the documentary, he meets with clinic psychologist, Dr Stephen Blumenthal to discuss the impact of his mother’s death on his present life.
In the documentary, Joey revealed that “I have kept a lot of stuff inside, things that happened to me, I haven’t been able to talk about. When I was ten, my mum took her own life and the truth is, I have never been able to deal with it. I have kept all this pain bottled up for 20 years, getting panic attacks, feeling anxious and pushing people away. But I can’t go on like this. I am thirty years old. I know it is going to be tough, but I am going to have to dig deep and it is time to ask for help.”
Later in his documentary, Joey Essex is seen talking to clinical psychologist Dr Stephen Blumenthal when he gets emotional and starts crying after looking at a photograph of his late mother.
Four years on after the documentary, Joey Essex decided to appear in the latest series of Love Island and has just been dumped alongside partner Jessy Potts ahead of the final. He has been criticised multiple times by the islanders throughout the show and was the ‘first celebrity contestant’ voted out by the other hopefuls.
It is Joey’s birthday today, he turned 34 on 29 July, and he said: “It’s my birthday on Monday so feels like I’m going out at a good time.”
Throughout the series, Joey has come under criticism for flirting with multiple islanders and also for annoying them, but what struck me most about him is how childish he is and in many ways seems trapped in the body of a 10 year old who lost his mum. I have thought the same thing about Prince Harry for many years.
In his book Spare, Prince Harry recounted the moment King Charles, the then Prince of Wales, wrote: “Pa didn’t hug me. He wasn’t great at showing emotions under normal circumstances. But his hand did fall once more on my knee and he said: ‘It’s going to be OK.’ But after that, nothing was OK for a long time.”
Ever since Prince Harry was forced to walk alongside his mother’s Princess Diana’s coffin at her funeral, he in a similar way to Joey Essex, looks like a haunted man. Despite both of them receiving therapy at a later date, the pair both seem to be unable to move on understandably from the momentous loss they both suffered.