Meet the Made in Chelsea players

When Ollie Locke first came to London he remembers stepping out of Sloane Square tube station, standing at the foot of the King's Road and thinking 'This is it. This is Chelsea'. 'I went to a party full of old Etonians just round the corner with my girlfriend of the time, and it slightly freaked me out - I mean, old Etonians what are they

'What are they like?' is largely what we, the viewing public, were thinking when we first watched Made In Chelsea on E4. Episode one glided through the immaculately-clad, cut-glass world of SW3, as the lights glittered on more bling than you could shake a Fabergé egg at. And bless them, the things they said: 'Food? Chelsea girls don't eat,' (Marc). 'I'm not sleeping with anyone other than my girlfriend. At the moment,' (Spencer). 'There's nothing more beautiful than a pretty girl in fur,' (Francis). And Twitter's favourite: 'Charles Dickens wrote Winnie The Pooh' (Binky), prompting one user to ask: 'How do they differentiate between sexual partners? Do they tap their heads with a fork and see what note it makes?' Old Etonians? They make Essex look clever.

'I suppose it isn't necessarily the ideal time to see rich kids having fun,' admits Spencer Matthews, the 22-year-old foreign exchange trader at the heart of a will-they-won't-they storyline. 'Online, especially Twitter, was bitchy at first. It's changed now, though. I've been on Twitter for four weeks, I've got 22,000 followers and most of them are 15-year-old girls sending me love hearts. Let's just say I'm wishing lots of people good luck with their GCSEs right now.'

The Twitter bitchiness after episode one has indeed subsided and, just like Ollie, as we got to know the Chelsea set we couldn't help but 'love it all'. Spencer flirting with his childhood sweetheart Caggie, then dumping his girlfriend Funda; Francis pulling out a pineapple while having his portrait painte. ('One day all this will become clear,' he told the artist); Hugo chasing Millie. Then Rosie. Then Millie again. As Caggie once said: 'In Chelsea the truth is more fabulous than fiction.'

The truth/fiction dilemma presents the only moral quandary that has lasted longer than a single episode - is this reality TV? Or is it something else entirely? Made In Chelsea was put together by many of the team behind ITV's The Only Way Is Essex, while TOWIE's producers are now busy working on Geordie Shore for MTV. On the one hand, Chelsea and Essex couldn't be more different: TOWIE is suburban nightclubs, boxing rings, pool parties and beauty salons for acrylic nails and vajazzling; Chelsea is Raffles, 86, and Francis - descended from French knights - working as a diamond dealer. In Essex they say 'shuutuup' and 'reem'; in Chelsea, it's 'totes maze' and 'awwwwesome'.

On the other hand, there's a lot of common ground. Daran Little, story producer on Chelsea, worked on the first season of TOWIE as well as penning scripts for EastEnders and Coronation Street. He helps ensure that the love matches, brawls and walkouts seem spontaneous when they are actually the result of hours of preparation. 'The storylines come from the stars. They'll phone us and say "This has just happened," or "I'm not happy in my relationship," or "I'm going to split up with someone,"' explains Chelsea's producer Sarah Dillistone, who also launched TOWIE. 'We say "Fine, let's do it tomorrow at this bar". It feeds from what is going on in their lives and then we make it look like a drama. We're set dressing moments from their lives.'

This idea of real life given a helping hand by TV cameras, producers and script writers is called structured reality. Or scripted reality. Or hyper reality. Or reality drama. Or even dramality. No-one's agreed on a name yet. But they do agree that it's a hit set to eclipse Big Brother and The X Factor. Geordie Shore is MTV's highest rating programme since 2003; last month saw The Only Way Is Essex pip Downton Abbey to a Bafta; and Made in Chelsea pulled in 640,000 viewers, making it E4's number three programme, outranking Hollyoaks and Friends and Channel 4's most Twittered-about show ever.

'Traditional soaps are in viewers' front rooms five nights a week and the line between actor and character gets slightly blurred,' explains Kate Woodward, news editor at Inside Soap magazine. 'With Essex and Chelsea there is no dividing line. Viewers can find the stars on Twitter, they can talk to them through Facebook, stalk them at premieres and they don't have to worry about them being different people in real life.'

'I'm going out with Hugo now,' Millie tells me. This was a revelation when we spoke but, thanks to episode six, is a widely-known fact today. 'I think it was always there, what was between us, but would we have actually got together if we hadn't done the show? I think so. But not yet, not now, maybe not for ages. Maybe not for years. They put us together when we wouldn't have spent time together. We all watched the shows together and I saw him leading me on and leading Rosie on and it became a catalyst. It speeded up real life. Like, I've always been interested in fashion and now, because of the show I've got an internship on a fashion magazine.'

At one point people weren't sure if Millie was real - summers at the family home in Menorca, friends on Cap d'Antibes, oxygen facials and ridiculous cheekbones. After meeting them, however, one thing became clear: everyone is playing themselves, only more so. The shoot, in gritty Stoke Newington, took the cast out of their comfort zone (although Caggie was in New York and Francis was in bed - with pneumonia, if you must know); none of them had been to North East London before. Ollie, fresh from coming out as bisexual on national TV, swapped tips with the make-up artist. Millie and Hugo were back from Cannes and flirting madly and pinching bottoms. Spencer couldn't quite believe the 'chavvy' clothes he was wearing, and Gabriella, dumped by Ollie just before he came out, was draped all over him, leading Ollie to exclaim, 'This is all a bit awkward', before she zipped home to write a song for a former X Factor winner.

Ollie, unsurprisingly, already has an agent. His worries over a modelling career - 'I look like a tired Brian May' - have disappeared. Of course, striking a pose has always been part of his plan. 'When I started in nightlife I was just cleaning up sick in clubs,' he grimaces. 'But I was always wearing white jeans, cowboy boots and an Ozwald Boateng shirt so people would think I was the manager. Now I get people coming up all the time. Last night it was a busload of schoolgirls in the Trocadero, shaking as they asked for my autograph. I'm like, "Don't shake darling, you should have seen me when I was cleaning up sick."'