WITH the new series of Big Brother just hours away, it won’t be long until a new batch of fame-hungry hopefuls are given their much-craved slither of fame.
But what became of previous contestants who for a few weeks of the year were all we could talk about?
From screeching Nikki Grahame to proud virgin Cameron Stout – not forgetting bottle-humping Kinga and ditzy hairdresser Helen Adams, we look at where our favourite contestants from yesteryear have ended up.
Kinga Karolczack
‘MAKING love’ to a wine bottle on national TV is a hard thing to live down, so unsurprisingly, Kinga chooses to keep a low profile.
She entered the house with the battle cry, “I’m here to enjoy myself and be part of the crowd.
“I’m also looking for a fling and to get my monster jugs out.”
BB6’s Kinga gets up to no good with a wine bottle
She certainly managed both, regularly peeling off and enjoying snogs with male housemates Craig and Antony.
After she left the house back in 2005 she tried her hand at singing and acting, but neither took off.
She also told The Mirror that she had been ‘conned’ by telly chiefs who encouraged her to act outrageously – and she actually only pretended to have sex with the bottle.
Kinga told the paper: “I can’t believe the reaction. I was just messing around because I was tipsy, but it never actually touched me.
“On Big Brother they want you to go crazy so give you loads of alcohol. And drinking makes me behave like a completely different person.
“So I just put the bottle between my legs, ran into the garden and did it again.
“I know I didn’t even lift up my nightie. I didn’t have sex in the pool or in the house, but everyone’s labelling me as the slapper.”
These days Kinga works as a PA – but it’s not known if she’s ever invited to after work drinks.
Helen Adams and Paul Clarke
STEPHANIE Davis and Jeremy McConnell aren’t the only people to fall in love in the romantic climes of the Elstree compound.
Helen and Paul’s budding relationship thrilled the nation, who adored the Welsh hairdresser – who once declared, “I love blinking I do”.
They didn’t get together until after they left the house in 2001, and enjoyed five happy years before splitting in 2006.
Helen Adams best ‘Helenisms’ from Big Brother 2001, she really does love blinking
When she left the house she released a fitness DVD, Dance Workout with Helen, but has since returned to her former career.
However, Paul was never able to go back to normal life – and hinted this was a reason behind their split.
He said: “For the last five years, on a daily basis people have been asking me, ‘how’s Helen? When are you getting married?’ and I’ve never met these people before in my life. It starts to drain you.
“It’s not that I don’t like talking about Helen, I just wanted to get away from it and be a private person again.”
He continued to stick the knife in to his ex, adding: “The last couple of months have been hell.
Helen Adams and Paul Clarke get together in Big Brother season two
“But deep, deep down we know we’re making the right decision.”
“From the day we met, we’ve never had time apart. We need to find ourselves again.”
Helen added: “We’ll always be friends and Paul will still help me with long words.”
Craig Phillips
AS the first ever Big Brother winner, Craig has secured his place in reality TV history.
The likeable Scouse handyman gave away his £70,000 prize pot to a friend with Down’s Syndrome when he stormed to victory in 2001, but has since amassed a huge fortune.
In 2014, he was ranked 15th on the Reality TV’s Richlist with an estimated wealth of £6.9m.
He’s still in the building trade, and as well as renovating properties to sell on, he”s the boss of his own production company, Avent Productions.
He’s also a popular after-dinner speaker, and makes corporate films for the construction industry.
Builder Craig Phillips wins the first ever Big Brother, beating Anna i
Craig also still appears on TV and has appeared on over 800 episodes of different shows as a building expert, including 60 Minute Makeover.
Speaking to the Shropshire Star, he said: “I think for me I was lucky because I already had a construction trade called Craig Phillips which I ran from Shropshire for 10 years before the show and that opened doors for me.
“A lot of people think they are going to go on a reality show and just become rich from it but the likelihood is, it is not going to happen.
“As quickly as they are making Big Brother and the X Factor, they come and go and they are ready for the next one before the stars of the last one have landed on their feet.”
Chanelle Hayes
CHANELLE entered the Big Brother house in 2007 totally obsessed with Posh Spice – and later claimed she’d had sex with her in-house boyfriend Ziggy every day for three weeks.
She revealed in 2014: “I know I’ve always denied that anything happened in Big Brother other than arguments and drama because I didn’t want to sound like the UK’s biggest slapper.
“But now we’ve got Geordie Shore and The Valleys I feel totally OK being honest and saying we actually had sex every day for about three weeks. Sorry, not sorry!”
Chanelle Hayes and Ziggy Lichman call it quits inside the house after TV romance
Their relationship wasn’t just love – there was a lot of war, too.
The couple rowed incessantly, and it was a big argument that triggered Chanelle packing her bags and leaving on day 62 of the show.
In the real world, they started a relationship but Chanelle dumped Ziggy after he denied they had gotten engaged.
He said: “If we’d stayed together she could have killed me.
Chanelle Hayes strips down to a bikini in the Loose Women studio
He said: “The furthest the conversation went was to say wouldn’t it be lovely if we got engaged in a year.
“I never gave her a ring but she turned up at a club with a ring on her engagement finger. She must have bought it herself.”
Earlier this week Chanelle appeared on Loose Women where she paraded her curvy size 16 figure in a bikini.
Brian Belo
INNOCENT-minded Brian won the nation’s hearts with his love for the finer things in life – namely Hollyoaks and cider.
He won the 2007 series of the show with ease, nabbing nearly two-thirds of all the votes placed in the final.
Brian was celebrated for lacking much common sense and general knowledge, and once famously asked his housemates, “Who’s Shakespeare?”
In a 2009 interview he said: “Being on Big Brother was a lot of fun and everything since has been a bonus.
BB 2015: New nominations bring new arguments
“When you’re in the house it’s like going back to being a little child, where there are no mobile phones and no bills to pay.
“You just spend all your time talking and playing around and we all got on so well.
“Winning didn’t really change me much. I think staying in Essex kept my feet on the ground. I couldn’t live in London.”
Brian rejoined Big Brother as a special guest housemate as part of a “timewarp” task last summer, but left after a week following comments made by ex-prostitute Helen Wood that he looked like a “murderer and a rapist”.
Nadia Almada
PORTUGUESE transsexual Nadia won Big Brother 5 in 2004, bur later revealed herself to be suicidal when she returned to the show for Ultimate Big Brother in 2010 – and found popularity had waned.
She said: “I want to end it all. I just feel my life isn’t worth living any more.
“I was the victim in that house but I was shown to be the villain.”
Nadia claimed to be a victim of editing, and claimed that viewers didn’t get the whole story when shown clips of her arguing bitterly with Coolio after he hid her clothes, telling off Ulrika Jonsson for breaking a plate and not clearing it up immediately and telling Josie Gibson that John James’ feelings weren’t real.
BB winner Nadia tries and fails to sit on a deck chair
She told The Daily Star Sunday: “I’m just gutted. I hate my life so much right now and sometimes ending it all is the only solution.
“I don’t know how much more I can take.”
These days she is training to be a hairdresser, and revealed on Facebook that she is studying for her Beginners Diploma at the Sassoon Academy.
Nick Bateman
THE original TV villain, Nick became the nation’s panto villain when he connived, cheated and sneaked his way through the first series of Big Brother.
He was kicked off the show for trying to rig nominations, making him the most hated man in Britain.
Nick later recalled: “It was surreal and strange, in the immediate aftermath, the show’s producers sat me down and said, ‘here are the papers’. I was front page in every one, apart from the Financial Times, where I was page three.
Craig Phillips challenges “Nasty” Nick Bateman about his infamous scraps of paper
“It was bizarre to see your name in print, on Ceefax, walking around in public the following day with a baseball cap on and in a blacked-out car, with people suddenly knowing who you were.
“It was a paradox, on one side it was great, but then in some situations it was really claustrophobic, like on the tube.”
He split from his wife of eight years in 2012, but did not divorce her until January just gone.
Nick now lives in Australia.
Josie Gibson
WEST country lass Josie was larger-than-life when she won Big Brother in 2010, scooping the £100,000 prize with 77.5 percent of the public vote.
While in the house, her love for Australian housemate John James kept the nation glued to their TV screens.
Upon leaving the house, she told Davina McCall: “I’m going to smooth him right over. Even if he doesn’t like me, it’s got to a point where he doesn’t have a choice!”
It was then reported that the “randy mare” and her new boyfriend enjoyed twenty minutes of alone time, before returning to party with their housemates.
However, it wasn’t all fun and games.
Josie told The Daily Star Sunday: “I’ve been through terrible things. There’s a dark side to being famous that people don’t realise exists.
Josie Gibson wins Big Brother
“I have had friends rob me and turn on me. And I’ve been ripped off by people so many times. There’s also constant abuse on Twitter.
“I had death threats from somebody that was meant to be my friend. That was one of the lowest points of my life.
“They said things like ‘I hope you have the same fate as your old man’.
“I also got ‘I can’t wait to hear your sister scream when she gets raped’. The messages were vile. It was just awful.
“I would not care if nobody knew my name ever again.”
Josie has since slimmed down – shedding six stone – and launched a successful fitness brand, Josie’s Slimmables.
A combination of a strict diet and exercise regime helped her slim down from 16st 7lb and a size 18 to 10st 2lb.
Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace
EVER since she hissed “You better know yourself, little girl” at screeching rival Nikki Grahame back in series 7, Aisleyne has been somewhat of a national treasure.
Upon exiting the house as a finalist, Aisleyne embraced her new-found fame, dating Mike Tyson and keeping herself at the forefront of TV fans’ minds with a constant stream of raucous – and sometimes controversial – social media updates.
Recently she went to war with ex-Towie star Frankie Essex over an unpaid £100 loan, which escalated as Aisleyne tried to get the money from her more-famous brother Joey.
But it’s not only in the Twittersphere where Aisleyne likes to battle – it can spill in to real life, too.
She returned to the Big Brother house last summer where she came face to face with arch rival Helen Wood, who controversially threatened to SPIT in her face should she enter the reality compound.
Aisleyne leads Big Brother snog-a-thon
Their feuding was, according to Aisleyne, fuelled by Helen’s desire to steal column inches from her, but reached new tensions after the vice girl posted a video of her slagging off Chloe Goodman when she appeared on Celebrity Big Brother’s Bit on the Side.
CBBBOTS was also the backdrop of a violent altercation between Aisleyne and Farah Abrahams in September, which resulted in the show being pulled off the air 12 minutes early as a result.
The bust-up saw them call each other a “nasty b***h” and “hag” while discussing evictions – and throwing glasses of champagne at one another.
Before entering the house a second time, Aisleyne admitted she missed her time in there.
She told Digital Spy: “It’s like it’s my house. Every time I watch it I feel like they’re squatters in there and I just want to be back in there with them experiencing it all.”
Cameron Stout
FISHERMAN Cameron was a real breath of fresh air when he entered the Big Brother house in 2003 – while most contestants love to brag of their sexual conquests, he was a proud 32-year-old virgin.
His victory in the 2003 series – which also included him spending a few days in the South African version of the show – wasn’t well received by all viewers, many of whom branded his ability to live a virtuous life and not argue with people on a whim as a symbol of him being “boring”.
He was also snubbed by show bosses when they celebrated the tenth birthday of the show in 2009 – they told him the day before the big event that they couldn’t afford to fly him from his home on the remote Scottish island of Orkney to London.
He told The Mirror: “I warned them travelling from up here could be costly. The day before I was due to go to London, they contacted me to say the fare was too much.
“You’d think they would have been switched on enough to realise not every winner lies a taxi ride from the studios.”
While bigwigs in London might not have appreciated his understated star quality, the islanders did.
In 2004 he was the subject of an exhibition at the Stromness Museum, with items on display including his letter of acceptance and his suitcase.
These days, after a short but successful career presenting on Scottish TV, he’s a columnist for the Aberdeen Post and avid charity fundraiser.
Michelle Bass
LIKE watching a lion pursuing an antelope on a nature programme, the summer of 2004 saw the British public grossly enthralled by the “love affair” between gobby Geordie Michelle and her “chicken”, Stuart Wilson.
It wasn’t only the way she ogled him a bit crazily that had people hooked – they were the first couple to consummate their relationship on screen in the history of the show.
Their antics shocked the house, and her dad Peter admitted he couldn’t bare to see what they were getting up to when he tuned in.
He told the Newcastle Chronicle: “I couldn’t watch the first time. When she was under the table I left the room.
Geordie babe Michelle Bass and Stuart Wilson get together in Big Brother 4
“I would do anything except watch the TV, I would go to the garage and tinker with the car, or find something to fix, anything. It wasn’t easy to watch, but that’s Michelle.”
But if he found that awkward, a few years after leaving the house she scored a gig presenting porn channel Television X.
He told the paper: “I worried at first, like any father would, but now she rings us and says don’t take any notice, it’s all just pretend.”
Michelle and Stu sadly split after a year, but she went on to marry her hypnotist, Steve McKeown, with whom she has a daughter.
Nikki Grahame
‘WHO is she?’ well Nikki is unarguably the most infamous of ALL Big Brother’s seventeen years’ worth of contestants – the tiny, noisy, screechy, confusingly likeable brat.
She appeared alongside Aisleyne in the 2006 series of the show and delighted viewers with her high pitched demands, drama queen antics and love affair with Tourette’s Syndrome sufferer – and eventual winner – Pete Bennett.
Upon leaving the house she starred in her own show, Princess Nikki, that was basically a weekly update of her losing her rag when being asked to do grim jobs like cleaning toilets or gutting fish.
Nikki Grahame: Best of tantrums
She also released her autobiography in 2008 where she described the horror of her suffering in her book Dying to Be Thin in which she revealed she had to be fed through a tube for two years and weighed only three stone at the age of 13.
This year she brought her one-woman drama machine to the Canadian version of the show, where she was voted in by the public – her reputation clearly proceeding her – and eventually coming sixth in the show.