It was a slip of the tongue by actress Michelle Keegan that set the hares running at ITV.

The star, being interviewed by Graham Norton at an event in April to showcase the channel’s upcoming projects, revealed she was on nickname terms with her new, very handsome, co-star Douglas Booth.

Explaining that the Great Expectations actor had brought a quiz book to entertain them both during long make up sessions while filming their forthcoming drama The Blame, Michelle referred to him as ‘Dougie’ before appearing embarrassed and quickly correcting herself to say ‘Douglas’.

Norton also asked the pair – who were there together – about the chemistry between them, which Michelle described as ‘organic’. She said they bonded over quizzes and food.

Despite being interviewed a year after they’d spent months filming in both Herefordshire and London, there was no doubt that they still got on very well.

Shortly afterwards, a very well known television insider giggled to me about Michelle’s mis-step, wondering what her husband, former The Only Way Is Essex star Mark Wright, must have made of his beloved wife going to work with Douglas every day.

Anyone who knows Mark, 39, knows just how much he loves and cherishes Michelle, also 39, but for many husbands it would be galling to have your wife taking a role which meant spending so much time with such a handsome co-star.

What must be even more irking is that in police drama The Blame, currently being heavily publicised in advance of its release date in a few weeks, Michelle and Douglas’s characters, DI Emma Crane and DI Tom Radley, end up falling in love.

Michelle Keegan and Douglas Booth attend the ITV Showcase 2026 at The Design Museum in London

In police drama The Blame, Michelle and Douglas’s characters, DI Emma Crane and DI Tom Radley, end up falling in love

Just to rub things in a little more, Douglas, 34, is known as something of a ‘luvvie’, with all the class that Mark, now a DJ on radio station Heart FM, lacks.

For while all parties are happily married – Douglas’s wife is the actress Bel Powley – Michelle’s friendship with him is indicative of just how much her professional path has diverged from her husband’s.

‘You can barely have a conversation with Mark without him telling you how much he adores Michelle, or Mich, as he likes to call her,’ says one family friend.

‘He is besotted, since the day he met her he couldn’t believe his luck, and he is extremely proud of her acting career.

‘But the fact that for quite some time Michelle was going off to work with someone so achingly handsome and sophisticated must have been quite a wrench. Was he jealous? Of course.

‘Michelle has moved herself into a professional position where she is surrounded with actors, posh ones, while Mark his at home posting on Instagram, or choosing records to play on Heart FM with his friend Olly Murs.’

Of course, Mark is a very attractive man, and he is also very, very charming.

Thanks to his property empire, he is also wealthy – worth around £5million – but he is worlds away from Michelle’s work husband when it comes to his social status.

Mark Wright, a former TOWIE star, and Michelle began dating in 2012 and married in 2015.

Michelle gave birth to their daughter, Palma Elizabeth Wright, in March last year

I first became familiar with Mark when he was friends with the late Jade Goody’s husband Jack Tweed.

Back then, he was keen to tip off journalists such as myself on celebrity gossip taking place in his home town of Brentwood, Essex, which was made famous by TOWIE.

In 2010, he joined TOWIE and quickly became its stand out star alongside his former girlfriend Lauren Goodger. During his tenure he was known for catchphrases such as ‘shut up’ and ‘complete plum’.

His dad, ‘Big Mark’, was a car salesman while mother Carole was a stay-at-home mum. Mark later appeared on I’m A Celeb followed by Strictly.

By contrast, Douglas was born in upmarket Greenwich, south-east London, to Simon – a managing director at Citigroup and Deutsche Bank – and Vivien, a half Spanish, half Dutch painter.

He and his sister, Abigail, a graduate from the Chelsea school of Art later moved to Sevenoaks, Kent, where Douglas, who is dyslexic, attended the fee-paying Solefield School.

By the age of 13, he was involved with the National Youth Theatre and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Douglas met Bel, 34, on the set of the film Mary Shelley back in 2017 before marrying at Petersham Nurseries in Richmond, south-west London, in 2023.

He previously dated The Trial of Christine Keeler star Ellie Bamber and Vanessa Kirby, who portrayed Princess Margaret in The Crown.

Michelle and Mark, meanwhile, got together at the end of 2012 after meeting while on separate holidays in Dubai.

To the shock of those who know her, 18 months later Michelle quit her role as Tina McIntyre in Coronation Street so she could move from her native Greater Manchester to Essex to be with Mark.

‘Nobody could understand what on earth she was playing at,’ says a source within Corrie who was stunned at Michelle’s decision. ‘She was an absolute star with a massive, young following and she gave it all up for Mark.

‘There were many fears over her career, that she had ended it all.

‘Thankfully it has come good, so good in fact that she really has moved up the echelons of the acting industry. Where that leaves Mark’s ego is the question that is being asked a lot at the moment.’

There was a time when there was a ‘Mark and Michelle’ brand. They gave joint interviews, walked the glitziest red carpets hand-in-hand and even launched their own business.

They also paired up on social media, and while their Instagram accounts alone boast a combined following of 9.3million (of which 7.3m are Michelle’s fans) they have become increasingly tailored to their own brands, featuring less and less on each other’s profiles.

And today they appear to have professionally uncoupled. Their clothing brand Aytee has closed down and while they are both ambassadors for Marks and Spencer, they appear separately.

Meanwhile, Mark has not appeared prominently on his wife’s page since January of this year, when she shared family photographs from a free holiday to Abu Dhabi’s five-star Rixos Premium Saadiyat Island with their 16-month-old daughter Palma.

Their joint family account no longer appears to be being used.

Despite Mark being something of a lothario on TOWIE, there has never been any suggestion of any marital issues between the pair.

Even when I was dispatched to watch Mark and 14 of his friends on his stag do back in Las Vegas in 2015, I found no sign of any misbehaviour.

However, family sources say that there have been some worries on Michelle’s part about judgmental comments Mark’s mum and sisters Jessica and Natalya made about women who wore thong bikinis earlier this year on their podcast, Wright At Home.

Some suggested that it would affect her increasingly high-profile acting reputation to be attached to such drama, so much so that her highly thought of publicist stepped in to calm the headlines down.

‘The comments really affected Michelle in many ways,’ says the source. ‘As she becomes more and more high end, getting caught up in such low end trouble is not going to be helpful at all.’

As for the coming weeks, Mark will now have to watch six episodes of Michelle starring alongside Douglas in The Blame, which has been adapted from the novel of the same name by Charlotte Langley.

So here’s a trigger warning for Mark: Shut your eyes for the last episode...