[LEE]

Here's a transcript of an interview with Jonny in this weeks 'Now' magazine. He doesn't exactly come over as depressed, but he does say he's a bit fed up that all the other finalists have quite a few lucrative offers and that he hasn't.

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Being the nice guy didn’t help me

He’s the nations favourite fireman, but Jonny Regan says being too nice probably stopped him winning Big Brother or getting any lucrative post-show deals.

He was the Geordie joker of the house – the one you could rely on for a laugh – and he received 2.2 million votes from viewers who judged him their favourite housemate. But Big Brother runner-up Jonny Regan is finding that being the funny, nice guy doesn’t always pay off.

While his fellow finalists are all set to make millions – Jade has already earned £500,000 in newspaper and magazine deals; Kate’s £70,000 prize cheque is just the tip of the ice-berg after signing a £180,000 magazine deal; and Alex got a reported £80,000 plus a £1 million offer to be the new face of Brylcreem – Jonny’s still waiting for the offers to start rolling in.

‘I’m quite happy to go back to my job as a fireman and sing in my band,’ says Jonny. ‘I don’t want to be classed as a wannabe because I never went into this for the stardom. If there are offers on the table, I’d be stupid to turn them down, but because I wasn’t zany enough or more eccentric in the house, I haven’t had a lot.

‘The psychotherapist told me that, out of the four of us, I came across as a nice, solid, decent bloke,’ he says. ‘But I was just too nice. The press couldn’t find any gossip on me. There weren’t any skeletons in my closet. Now I’m regretting that. If I’m going to get the least interest, despite coming second, then I wish I’d had something more juicy,’ he jokes.

But fans of Jonny will argue that the 29-year-old firefighter did have plenty of juicy moments in the house and he reveals it wasn’t just Alex, Adele and Kate who played Follow The Van – a kinky sex game involving a plastic, glow-in-the-dark Scooby-Doo van.

‘I played Follow The Van with Kate,’ grins Jonny. ‘She just followed the van with her head and, at one point, I lay on my back on the bed, held it over my head and she tripped over and fell on top of me. Then we just giggled and we just rolled off.

‘Perhaps if I’d been single, I’d have taken things a bit further. Big Brother is grea for single lads. You’re locked in there and the weather starts getting hotter, the lads are all wandering around in their trunks, the lasses are wearing bikinis, you’re sharing bedrooms, you jump in and out of baths together – it’s brilliant fun. But when you’ve got your missus on the outside, it’s incredibly frustrating.

But Jonny’s fiancée, 31-year-old accountant Joanne Llewellyn, had nothing to worry about. The couple have been together for eight years and Jonny says he’d never cheat on her.

‘Kate knows how faithful I am to Joanne and how I feel about her,’ he says. ‘I told Kate that I fancied her. She’s really sexy, but as I started to get to know Kate I realised how crazy she was and how much she liked to have a laugh. This is where the brother-and-sister bond began to form. ‘Kate’s my “geezer bird”. I have more in common with Kate than I do with my friends back home.

‘If I was bored, I’d throw Kate on the floor and tickle her; put a towel over her head and throw her all over the place; or have a game of hide-and-seek. It was tiny, stupid little things and we kept doing them again and again – people might say we were repetitive but it never failed to amuse us. I went back to being a 10-year-old in the house.

‘But Joanne is the one for me. I missed her birthday in the house and I got all the housemates to sing Happy Birthday to her – but Channel 4 didn’t show that.’

He admits it was tough going without sex for nine weeks. ‘It got harder and harder,’ he says. ‘All the lads were joking that we were leaving the house with fully loaded weapons. I told PJ some poor girl is going to have her back put out when he gets out. But it would be like Tommy Two-Strokes – all over in seconds.’

PJ is one of the few people Jonny hopes to keep in touch with. He has sorted out his differences with Alex and admits to being very fond of Jade. But if there’s one person he could happily never see again, it’s Adele.

Uncharacteristically for Jonny, he says: ‘She’s a bitch. I thought she was a really nice, genuine girl in the house, but apparently she said some really nasty things behind my back. But let’s leave it in the house – what happened, happened.’

It’s the first time Jonny has spoken so strongly against any of the housemates, but he says there’s a good reason why he has bitten his tongue for so long. ‘I went into the house a paranoid wreck,’ he says. ‘People had told me: “Don’t swear, don’t lose your rag,” and my fire chief told me I could lose my job if I showed up the fire brigaid. So I really curbed my temper and tried to stop getting any full frontals on camera.

‘Looking back, maybe I should’ve flown off the handle every time I felt like it. Being the nice guy didn’t do me any favours. The first thing that got my goat was the “Weegate” scandal with Alex. I thought: “I’m a 29-year-old and I’m not going to have some 23-year-old boy tell me how to act.” But Sandy annoyed me the most. When he told me he didn’t like me, I shouldn’t have held back. But I was worrying too much.’

Now his only worry is how Big Brother will affect his life. There’s talk that he might front a fire safety campaign and a possible promotion with Woodpecker Cider, but Jonny hopes that it will create more demand for his band Reagan.

‘It’s like a cabaret show, we don’t stand there playing instruments, we have our own light show and dance routines. So far, we’ve played to audiences of 500, but if we can go to venues that seat 1,000 - that would be fantastic’.

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