My revenge when I found out my footballer boyfriend had cheated on me… and the truth about why I then married him anyway: Love Island star OLIVIA ATTWOOD reveals all

When a dolled-up Olivia Attwood entered the famous Love Island villa, she said she had one ambition… revenge. Her football boyfriend Bradley Dack had cheated on her and she wanted him to regret ruining their relationship.

And with her scanty bikinis and sassy personality, her mission was accomplished.

Not only that, but her appearance led to an unexpected reunion with then Blackburn Rovers star Bradley and the pair are now husband and wife. Her stint on Love Island also led to a blossoming career as a TV presenter.

Now, armed with her own romantic experiences, 33-year-old Olivia is launching a reality series on ITV: Bad Boyfriends.

Commissioned by eight long-suffering girlfriends, the series attempts to transform their partners—among them cheaters, commitment-phobics, and male children—into much better boyfriends.

Olivia, who is quick-witted and direct, recalls her motives for appearing on Love Island’s third series in 2017. ‘I wanted revenge on my ex-bad boyfriend Bradley, and it worked. Since then, I’ve been inundated with messages from women asking for relationship advice,’ says Olivia, who has amassed 2.2 million followers on Instagram.

‘A lot of girls think I have the answers to everything. I don’t pretend to have them – I just say it like it is. But I love talking to people about relationships, especially girls who are younger than me, and showing them where I went wrong.’

Surprisingly, Olivia had turned down an offer to take part in the second season of Love Island because of another cheater.

‘I wanted to go into the villa for season two but I turned it down for a guy who ended up cheating on me,’ she recalls. ‘Then I initially turned down season three – until I found out Brad was seeing his ex-girlfriend. I thought, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe this has happened to me again. What am I doing?’

“Anyone who’s ever been cheated on knows it’s just the most horrible thing. Brad and I hadn’t met each other’s families at that point, but we were in a relationship. I was devastated.”

Olivia was preparing to appear as a grid girl at a Formula 1 Grand Prix race in 2017 when she received a call from a crying woman, with no caller ID, saying she was Bradley’s girlfriend.

“I’ll remember that phone call for the rest of my life because it was so traumatic, almost terrifying because you have an out-of-body experience. When you hear that, your brain starts trying to piece it all together, thinking, ‘How? Where? When?’ Your mind just goes into overdrive,” Olivia explains.

‘The next day I was standing on the Formula 1 circuit looking beautiful, while everyone was drooling over me. But inside I wanted to cry because I felt so ugly and I kept asking myself, ‘Why do I keep getting cheated on? I can’t even get a man to keep it in his pants.’

‘It was a horrible feeling. But it made me realise that I couldn’t miss the Love Island opportunity again. Luckily they still wanted me.’

On the show, Olivia met TV presenter Chris Hughes and they dated for six months before she and Bradley rekindled their romance in 2018. They married last year.

‘When I started the show I wanted to move on completely,’ Olivia recalls. ‘In my mind there was no Brad after Love Island. I went into it with a lot of anger. I was angry at men and I was very reactive – like a cat on a hot tin roof. And it’s great television. But it would take a lot more to make me angry now.

“I met Chris and we tried longer than most, but we realized we were from different worlds. When you leave the show, there’s a nostalgia that only the two of you can ever share. But essentially, in the real world, we weren’t two people meant to be together.”

But her reunion with Bradley wasn’t all smooth sailing.

‘It was a bumpy ride,’ Olivia admits. ‘I try to be honest because people think that he and I just got back together after Love Island and there you have it – a fairytale. But it wasn’t. The first six months of dating were quite rocky because we were both on our guard. I was navigating the fact that I wasn’t on Love Island anymore; he was at a new football club. We were getting to know each other again.’

“And trust is something you have to earn. People can change. It depends on how motivated you are. Talk is cheap, but you have to show the commitment. We would have building blocks, then we would continue to have small setbacks, and eventually you get to a place where you have a foundation.”

Now it’s time for Bad Boyfriends, in which eight unsuspecting men are flown to a Greek island, thinking they’re filming a reality show focusing on masculinity and bromance in a hedonistic holiday paradise.

When Olivia, who is joined as co-host by her famous boyfriend Pete Wicks, announces the true purpose of the show – to make them better friends – they are shocked; but when their long-suffering friends arrive, they are embarrassed and ashamed.

Still, Olivia has a tough job getting the wayward group back on its feet.

There’s Viktor, who has been with his partner Maria for six years but doesn’t want to get married. Ruben’s girlfriend Liily describes him as ‘a loverboy…way too flirtatious’. Eli has ‘a bad reputation with women’, says his partner Anna (‘Most girls I meet around my age have slept with him’, she adds). And Ryan’s girlfriend Sapphia says: ‘I’m his mother: I set his alarms for him, I check his diary. He’s very flirtatious. I think he likes it when people like him.’

Olivia says, “I really connected with the women. I think they felt safe and comfortable with me, that there was no judgment. I told them, ‘Honey, I’ve literally been there. I’ve been through this.’

The girls work together on missions to expose their boyfriends’ bad behavior. First, there’s a seduction test, where the guys are subjected to a series of honey traps by the girlfriends, who are incognito, on a night out.

The results are devastating for the girls, and before they confront the boys, Olivia confesses: ‘I’ve got more of a front than Asda, but even I’m a bit nervous. Some of them might feel a bit sorry. The last thing they want to see is their girlfriend standing in front of them. And they’re not just going to recognise their girlfriend, they’re going to recognise the other girlfriends who were undercover and flirting with them.’

As the series continues beyond 11 episodes, expect a crackdown as those unable to improve are voted out.

“Everyone can relate to this show. For a lot of the couples we have, it’s a make or break thing. It’s about exposing their boyfriend’s behavior, because they don’t realize how hurtful they are. We say, ‘Look at the person you love in tears. This is the effect it’s having on them.’ And it’s a big wake-up call. And then if the boyfriend doesn’t care, you have your answer,” Olivia says matter-of-factly.

“It was a slow process because a lot of guys are programmed to just say what they think their girlfriend wants to hear—to deny it until you die,” Olivia says. “But girls are smart and know when they’re not seeing the whole picture, and that creates tension. I know when Brad is holding something back, but you have to wait for that person to tell you the truth.”

However, she insists, “I’m not a therapist and I don’t pretend to be one on this show. But I’ve always played the role of therapist in my friendship groups and in my family.

“I’m the oldest daughter, so everyone calls me when there’s a problem, and I’m the one who tries to patch things up. So I know you can get through anything with someone you love and who loves you.”

With a CV that includes TOWIE, Celebs Go Dating, documentary series Getting Filthy Rich, regular appearances on Loose Women and her own podcast, So Wrong It’s Right, it’s hard to believe that Olivia was once a shy schoolgirl growing up in London.

“My self-confidence came much later. I was an anxious child,” she says. “I used to do things impulsively because of my ADHD, but I was a nervous wreck. After I left school, I spent years trying to make my world as small as possible, to eliminate anything that would make me anxious.

“I was in a relationship with a guy and living with him, and I just made everything small. I was like, ‘I’m afraid of elevators. I’m afraid of raw chicken. I’m sick. I’m afraid of flying.’ I turned down modeling jobs because I didn’t want to travel.

Then I consciously thought at night, ‘Enough is enough. I’m going to flip the switch. Every day I’m going to do something that makes me really uncomfortable, because otherwise I’m going to be stuck with this horrible boy in this apartment for the rest of my life.’ Then I started smashing the doors.

And through those doors emerged the brash and sincere TV presenter she is today.

Olivia Attwood’s Bad Boyfriends, Sunday, 9pm, ITV2 & ITVX.