It was the most excruciating moment in an already cringeworthy reality television show.
During filming for the 2013 Christmas special, the entire cast of Made In Chelsea was locked in one of its many explosive group rows – this time over newbie Lucy Watson’s relationship with Jamie Laing.
The show’s designated ‘unlucky in love’ character, a 28-year-old PR executive called Francesca ‘Cheska’ Hull, stepped in to defend Lucy from the show’s ‘mean girls’ Sophie Hermann and Victoria Baker Harber.
What followed was one of the most brutal putdowns in the history of the notoriously bitchy Channel 4 show.
‘Don’t f***ing open your f***ing mouth, you fat f***ing turkey,’ Victoria shouted from across the table at Cheska, leaving other cast members visibly shocked.
A year later, Cheska left the show after eight series, having been one of the original ‘Sloane Rangers’, citing ‘anxiety and depression’ for her departure.
‘Friends told me to stop but part of me was scared,’ she recalled. ‘I had a degree and education, but I didn’t know how I could get a serious job after the show.’
And while her Made In Chelsea alumni, Ollie Locke and Binky Felstead, are facing scrutiny for various missteps in the public eye this week, many are asking what became of their former best friend.
I can reveal that Cheska, now 40, and her eight-year-old son, Charlie, have relocated to the tropical hotspot of Phuket, Thailand, where she works for a hotel company.
A source close to the former reality star, who had launched a number of ill-fated business ventures in the UK, tells me: ‘Cheska could not be happier with her decision. Moving to Thailand made sense for her and her son.
‘She certainly misses her family and friends, but there are also those she is glad to have left behind.’
For I am also told that, while she still considers former castmates Fran Newman Young and Ollie Locke close friends, relations with her former bestie and right-hand lady, Binky Felstead, have grown sour.
A source close to the situation reveals: ‘Cheska’s primary role on Made In Chelsea revolved around being a shoulder to cry on for Binky and to tell her whenever a boyfriend cheated on her, and she knew that.
‘But a lot happened below the surface and Binky ended up unfollowing Cheska. Eventually, Cheska gave up and returned the favour, they’ve not been close for years now.’
It will no doubt have left a bitter taste in Cheska’s mouth, considering that it was she who brought Binky on board after being approached to appear on Made In Chelsea in 2011 and effectively kick-starting her career as an influencer.
It was last year in July, the single mother of one packed up her home in Devon and moved over 6,000 miles to work in PR for Anantara, a group of luxury resorts, and as a digital nomad for the food and drink firm, Raw.
Her Instagram profile – captioned ‘Everything works out…’ – documents a colourful life packed full of activities such as kayaking and zip–lining, even water fights at the hotel.
It’s all very different from what she left behind in Britain.
During her Made In Chelsea days, Cheska set up a PR company, Big Smoke, alongside her then-business partner, the media guru Sam Dowler.
Her job largely involved shepherding celebrities in and out of exclusive nightclubs and Cheska spent most of her four-year career on screen guzzling champagne.
‘If I wasn’t doing work for a nightclub, I was out at a nightclub,’ she told friends. ‘Lunches tended to be a drinky thing. You’d start drinking at lunch time and be at Raffles until 5am.
‘It got to the point where seeing the same drunk people over and over again became tedious and depressing. It was not the way I wanted to lead my life.’
Big Smoke went up in a cloud of well, smoke not long after hosting the Made In Chelsea fragrance launch in 2014 at Raffles. By the time it went into liquidation in 2016, it had amassed just 200 Instagram followers.
According to Companies House, the liquidator received claims for £2,209, which were paid out of the firm’s leftover cash, leaving no outstanding debts when the company was dissolved.
A year later, feeling burned out, Cheska went to Devon for a bank holiday weekend to stay with her mother and never returned, taking up a job as a buyer in her mother’s arts and crafts shop, Amelia’s Attic in Salcombe, known as ‘Chelsea on Sea’ and Britain’s second-most expensive seaside town after Sandbanks.
With its pricey kaftans, pearl necklaces and upmarket baby clothes, it catered to the gilet-wearing yachties who inch their Range Rovers down the narrow high street of Salcombe in the summer months.
Cheska enjoyed a quiet existence, selling upcycled seashells in her mother’s shop from her boutique business, Made By Cheska. But it was too good to last. Amelia’s Attic went into voluntary liquidation, 16 years after it was launched, in February 2024.
While she has often complained that the producers of Made In Chelsea had created an unflattering image of her as a Bridget Jones figure, Cheska was no more lucky in love in Chelsea on Sea.
Shortly after moving down to Devon, she met the chef, Tom Huggett, but the pair split months after she got pregnant with their son, Charlie.
She reluctantly returned to Made In Chelsea, agreeing to be filmed revealing her pregnancy to Binky, who was having her own baby shower in series 13.
But following her cameo, she left the show saying she was adamant that she would never go back.
‘One hundred per cent not,’ she said. ‘Not if they paid me millions and millions of pounds. The best therapy was coming down here and being able to close the door on that London life.’
Five years later she met local carpenter and dad-of-three, Damian Crook. Following their initial meeting in the playground of their children’s school, the pair embarked on a ‘whirlwind’ romance after reconnecting on dating app Tinder.
Damian proposed 11 months after they first met and Cheska admits that, at the time, she ‘felt like the luckiest girl in the whole world’, convinced that her bad luck with men had finally ended.
But less than a year later, while she was planning their beach wedding, the relationship ended with friends close to Cheska saying the breakup was a result of their lives being on ‘different trajectories’.
Reflecting on her move to Thailand in an interview with Business Insider earlier this year, she said: ‘There was another catalyst, too.
‘At the time, I was engaged to be married and realised that wasn’t the path for me any more. Once I called off the wedding, the door felt wide open. Nothing was holding me back.’
