Want to know what the shiniest couple on British TV get up to in their downtime?
“Call us sad, but we enjoy going food shopping, looking round the aisles, choosing different things. We love it,” says Mark Wright. “When I was young, my mum was like, ‘Oh I’ve gotta go food shopping, bloody hell,’ but it’s not a chore for us, it’s kind of our day out!”
Wright, an original cast member on The Only Way Is Essex, will have been married to Brassic and Fool Me Once star, Michelle Keegan, 37, for a decade this May. And yep, you’re more likely to spot them moseying round M&S Food than out on the town.
“I love my food and I love cooking, it’s something that’s a massive hobby for Michelle and I,” says the Heart FM DJ, which is why he’s joined forces with M&S on a new slow-cooked range of meals – the beef short rib is his favourite.
He and Michelle, who live in a Georgian mansion in Essex, tend to cook together. “Sometimes I’ll cook for Michelle, sometimes she’ll cook for me, if one of us is coming home late, but normally we’ll cook together because we enjoy it,” he says. Push him on who is ‘head chef’ though, and it’s clear he’s sous chef. “Michelle is a little bit better than me – she won’t like the ‘little bit’ because she thinks she’s a lot better! But I am slowly catching her up,” he says wryly.
On the average evening, you’d catch him throwing together a stir fry, but for a date night at home, “our go to is tapas.” “Michelle is unbelievable at gambas prawn pil pil. I always say no one could beat Michelle’s prawn pil pil, not even in Spain,” raves Wright. “We love a bit of tapas, a ‘bits table’ night, a bit of baked camembert cheese with garlic bread, prawn pil pil and chicken dippers and a cheeseboard – that’s our favourite thing with a movie.”
The couple are expecting their first child together, and while he hasn’t filled the freezer full of meals for those early months of parenthood (“I’ve not really thought about that bit yet!”) Wright is looking forward to passing on his love of food to his little one. “I’m definitely going to get my kid into curry, because I love a curry,” he says. “I feel like you’re moulded when you’re young. My mum and dad used to take us for a curry – that was a night out when we were kids, a curry on a Saturday night at the Rima Tandoori it was called, if I remember rightly.
“I carried that on to my adult life. I remember leaving home and I’d still go for an Indian every Saturday, now, I still love it. You grow up with it and it becomes a ritual.”
Raised in East London, he was brought up on his mum’s shepherd’s pies and lasagnes. “Sometimes I’d go to bed and I would smell garlic and chilli and I’d be like, ‘What’s that?’ I remember once I thought, ‘I’m gonna go down and check,’ because we’d go to bed and then we weren’t allowed down after that.
“I went downstairs and was like, ‘What’s that smell?’ And mum and dad had these big grilled prawns under the grill and I was like, ‘Absolutely liberty! We get the basic everyday food and they’re waiting for us to go to bed while they eat their big king prawns!’ I remember trying one and I must’ve only been about eight or nine, and it was the first time I was introduced to that rich, garlicky, chilli food – adult food, and I absolutely loved it. That’s probably where my love of food and my being a foodie came from.”
From then on, “when we used to go out for dinner with my mum and dad, I would leave the kid’s menu and have something on theirs – mum and dad probably never liked it because it was probably more expensive!”
While he loves cooking now, when he first left home and was working in London as a nightclub promoter – which led to him joining the first series of TOWIE – “I used to go to the local petrol garage and buy those microwave shepherd’s pies or microwave spaghetti bolognese, but that was in my partying days, so I’d just shove that down me and get out on the town,” he remembers with a laugh. Then, on the way home, “we always used to get a salt beef bagel from Brick Lane, or a Maccy D’s Filet-O-Fish, double cheese and chips.”
And yes, he is a pudding man. “I’ve got a massive sweet tooth. Banoffee pie is my absolute go-to,” he buzzes, although sadly it’s so retro now, you rarely see it on menus. “If they’ve got a banoffee pie, I will always order it, even if I’m not hungry because I love it.”
Wright has joined BBC show Clean It, Fix It, with a new series out in March (“It’s a very moving show,”) and his Heart FM show “might be changing to something a little bit bigger, but I can’t say what that is yet. Some exciting stuff coming up in radio, that’s all I’ll say!”
And he’s had numerous “pinch-me moments” during his career, from interviewing celebrities while working in LA, to playing Soccer Aid alongside “my heroes”. He’s also come runner up on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! and braved Strictly Come Dancing, but he’s not yet done Celebrity MasterChef. Would he consider it? “Ha, I don’t know, maybe! Who knows!”
M&S Food Ambassador Mark Wright is working with Marks & Spencer to celebrate the newly upgraded Slow Cooked range with global dishes bringing maximum flavour to the dinner table with minimum effort.
