Gossip Girl

Red of hair and quick of quip, seeing as MTV couldn’t be bothered showing actual music anymore, new presenter Alice Levine is the next best thing to check out. Hosting Celebrity Bites every Friday at 8pm, she somehow manages to make a gossip show not seem like the most vacuous thing on earth.

When Hot Press talks to her, she’s just back from Madrid, where she took up red carpet and backstage duties at the EMAs.
“Oh my goodness. it was so good but I’ve never been so petrified in my long life!” she says of the night. “I couldn’t believe how scary it was, because I’ve never done live TV before. Everyone’s so frantic and there’s such a kind of frenetic energy in the air. It’s all a bit full-on. I did the red carpet and then I had to rush backstage and grab people as they were coming off. I was talking to the lovely Vampire Weekend, some lovely Disney stars – Emily Osment and Miley Cyrus. And rock legend Slash was there! Then of course you had Eva Longoria as the host, Russell Brand...”
Speaking of which, we all remember the household-name MTV presenters over the years – Donna Air... um, Richard Blackwood... What is slightly forgotten is that Mr. Brand started off his career as the hilarious, high-as-a-kite host of Dancefloor Chart many moons ago. So can Alice ever see herself ringing up Manuel to inform him that she has slept with his granddaughter?
“Do you know what? I can’t imagine that! Can you?” she laughs. “I know I sound just like him, a lot of people get us mixed up actually – if they can’t get Russell , they get me. I was almost in Get Him To The Greek – it’s weird you mention that!”
Also “weird” was how she landed the MTV gig in the first place.
“I didn’t really audition for it, as such,” Alice explains. “I was a production assistant making an online show. A friend of mine made a showreel for me and I was looking for an agent through that. Someone then approached my agent after seeing my showreel and said, ‘We’d like to meet her and have her make the pilot for Celebrity Bites’. That was a year ago now.”
Had she always wanted to become a ‘TV personality’?
“I suppose I’d always wanted to do something where I could be a show off!” she admits. “I was always a bit of a precocious little girl, always wanting to do shows for my brother and mum and dad. I never really thought about doing TV until I went to university and started doing student TV. I began to think this might be something really fun to do.”
So would Alice Levine be a gossip queen were it not for the show?
“I’m so bad. I’m bad at names. I’ve never known so much about celebrity culture since working on the show. The girls that work as the researchers, they always fill me in, because I’m a little bit rubbish. I don’t know if I’d be into it otherwise.”
Celebrity Bites has been running for just over two months. Its celeb gossip subject matter could be coma-inducing were it not for the humour and cynical edge Alice employs. She seems the heir to Simon Amstell’s pop throne.
“Popworld in its heyday is definitely an inspiration. The writing on that was so, so slick.” says Alice. “I think our own show is really, genuinely funny. We just don’t take ourselves too seriously. It’s more tongue-in-cheek than anything I’ve seen.”

Alice hosts Celebrity Bites every Friday at 8pm on MTV.