'They thought they were being really clever': Pete Wicks says his romance with Olivia Attwood 'just happened'. But now insiders decode the true origins of their love story... and tell KATIE HIND about 'smoke and mirrors'

The clue was perhaps in the date last year that Kiss FM chose to announce its new presenting duo of Olivia Attwood and Pete Wicks.

Having pulled off a big-money deal to secure the pair to host a Sunday afternoon show, the radio station sent out a jovial press release to share the news on February 14 – a date known to romantics, of course, as Valentine’s Day.

‘It’s Friday, February 14 and love is in the air, especially in the Kiss radio studios as the icons that are Olivia Attwood and Pete Wicks finally announced this morning that they were getting together,’ it read.

The partnership, it stressed, was very much a ‘professional’ one, to host a brand-new show, Sunday Roast, which launched several weeks later in March.

And while the statement was obviously tongue-in-cheek and designed to get as much publicity for the new show as possible, it turned out to be more prophetic than radio bosses could have imagined.

A year later, photographs of the reality TV stars kissing in a Soho bar were published in a red-top newspaper – leaving everyone in no doubt as to the fact that this so-called professional relationship had clearly morphed into something far more intimate.

But perhaps the biggest questions were over when exactly this had happened.

Chief among those taking an active interest was Olivia’s ‘husband’ Bradley Dack, whom she’d married in 2023 in a lavish ceremony at a Knightsbridge hotel (the marriage was later revealed not to be legally binding), and from whom she’d split just months earlier.

It meant that, rather than the couple’s blossoming romance being greeted as the organic love story that ‘hopeless romantic’ Pete had longed for, it turned into an almighty briefing war and a reputational salvage operation.

After all, it’s hard to turbo-charge two broadcasting careers and maintain lucrative sponsorship deals if there’s a nasty split grumbling on in the background. ‘Olivia was with Bradley and it was a very public relationship,’ says a source familiar with the pair. ‘She wasn’t happy and wanted to extricate herself from that relationship, but what Pete’s very sensible team didn’t want was his reputation to be at all affected by him getting together with a married woman.

‘It wasn’t going to be a great look. It was also going to be a lot of drama and Pete really doesn’t like that any more.’

It seems the PR job to rescue Olivia’s reputation alone cost her tens of thousands of pounds. Positive picture opportunities were set up, mostly orchestrated by her publicist Callum Bracken who, I’m told, is paid around £5,000 a month to keep her image immaculately well-polished.

Meanwhile, over at Team Pete, his loyal and highly regarded agent Gemma Mokbel, a former tabloid journalist, was tasked to make sure her client did not get caught up in the crossfire of Olivia and Bradley’s break-up. I’m told both sides came together to work out a media strategy which would launch the love birds to the public without damaging either of their brands.

A challenge for the most seasoned PR professional. But did they manage to fulfil the brief?

In some respects, yes. Pete, the heavily tattooed bad boy who made his name on ITV2’s The Only Way Is Essex, yesterday spoke for the first time about his relationship with 35-year-old Olivia – Liv to her friends – in the Daily Mail Weekend Magazine.

‘She’s become my best friend,’ he said. ‘She’s that before anything else. I have fallen in love for the first time and I don’t really have anything to compare it to.’ Pete, 37, also told how he ‘didn’t really know where it came from’ and that ‘it just happened’. 

Pete, who dated Love Island finalist Maura Higgins for six months between 2024 and 2025, insists that he and Olivia only started spending more time together in February this year, weeks after she briefed a newspaper that she had split from Gillingham FC footballer Bradley, adding: ‘Things progressed – towards the middle part of this year it came to, “Wow. This could be something.” Then we were together.’

But what he didn’t mention was the fact that rumours of their fondness for one another had actually started as early as August 2025 – some six months previously.

Photographs taken on a yacht in Ibiza, where the pair were presenting their radio show, appeared to show them looking rather cosy together.

Olivia was seen putting her head into Pete’s chest as he wrapped his arms around her. Little wonder it prompted speculation that they were more than just friends, and that her marriage to Bradley was on the rocks. Bradley, perhaps unsurprisingly, was reportedly ‘furious’ at the snaps, which sources tell me caused serious disagreements between him and Olivia.

Having found fame as a finalist on Love Island in 2017, Olivia is, I’m told, keen to be seen as a ‘girl’s girl’ and to continue making ITV documentaries which appeal to a lucrative young audience. For her, too, cheating rumours were not good for her brand.

Some damage limitation rapidly ensued. Days after the pictures on the White Isle were published, a journalist at a red-top newspaper who routinely writes positive stories about Olivia spun a different yarn. Far from being furious, Bradley – so the story claimed – was just a ‘concerned husband’ and was actually ‘happy’ that Olivia had gone to Ibiza for a ‘blow out’ because she ‘works so hard’.

That has been written off as ‘nonsense’ by those who know him.

And it failed to shake off rumours that all was not well between the couple. Finally, in January, their split was announced by the same journalists – with Bradley blamed for breaching Olivia’s trust and allegedly cheating on her repeatedly throughout their ten-year relationship.

Around this time, Olivia’s management company had hired Callum Bracken, who used to be a PR supremo at ITV. They masterminded the story about Bradley being at fault for the relationship ending – which the article claimed had left Olivia ‘devastated’.

‘It was all a set-up so the public couldn’t see what was really going on,’ says my snitch involved in the project. ‘They thought they were being clever.’

Yet the reality is somewhat different. It was, in fact, four months before the public announcement of their split that Olivia and Bradley’s marital home in Cheshire had been put on the market – and just weeks after she and Pete were seen canoodling in Ibiza.

A sure sign, one might think, that the relationship was long over by the time Olivia’s PR machine had kicked into action.

‘It was smoke and mirrors all the way,’ says my source. ‘What was being presented to the public through the Press was really quite different.’

The campaign rattled on, with Pete and Olivia placed on the same table for the Brit awards at the Co-Op Live venue in Manchester in February.

Still, though, Olivia’s PR insisted that she was single – a statement which looked rather ridiculous hours later when a paparazzo snapped the pair returning to a hotel in the early hours of the morning, carrying two pizza boxes.

A month later, those pictures of Olivia and Pete kissing in the Flute Bar in London’s Soho were published, extinguishing all doubt that the couple were an item.

Just days before they were taken, I’d dined with Olivia and she had insisted she wasn’t dating Pete – although she did admit that he ‘wanted to go out with her’.

Still, she claimed, she wasn’t sure about him.

But despite the expensive publicity machine, there was one rather important factor in the timeline of Pete and Olivia’s romance that she neglected to address – her wedding.

In June 2023, she and Bradley got married at the five-star Bvlgari hotel in London, where she wore a stunning £30,000 lace gown by designer Galia Lahav. The day was featured in a one-off television special, Olivia Marries Her Match, for ITV2.

However, word reached me that it was a sham. The marriage was never legally binding and Olivia was never officially Mrs Dack.

‘It was all about the cash,’ said my source.

All pretence was swept away in June when Pete and Olivia were pictured again, kissing passionately on their sunbeds in St Tropez.

Sure enough, a month later they went ‘Instagram official’ with a set of loved-up black-and-white snaps taken in Ibiza.

Pete had flown out to visit Olivia as she filmed her show Bad Boyfriends.

But one of the pictures he posted was rather telling – it showed the couple lying on a yacht in a pose very similar to the one that had caused such a stir a year previously.

‘Olivia was clearly making a point,’ says my source. ‘They had come full circle and finally both had got what they wanted.

‘It was just never as neat and wholesome as what they’d liked their fans to have believed.’