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BB2 Brian Dowling, Helen and Paul, Dean and the rest of the Big Brother 2 housemates from 2001.

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Old 26-05-2007, 02:40 PM #1
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Default New Helen interview

May 26 2007

by Rin Simpson, Western Mail


Welsh hairdresser Helen Adams found love and notoriety after appearing on Big Brother – but it came at a cost. Rin Simpson talks break-ups, celebrity and a new breed of fame-hungry contestants with the woman who put the joys of blinking on the map

SIX years ago Helen Adams was a wide-eyed, fresh faced hairdresser from Cwmbran, an unknown face about to embark on a life-changing stint in the Big Brother house.

A lot has changed since that summer – the show has gone from social experiment to headline-generating controversy machine, the house mates from innocent eccentrics who sang karaoke for their supper to all-out crazies who do very unnatural things with wine bottles.

But amid all the chaos, Helen is still wide-eyed, still fresh faced, still a hairdresser.

And she still likes blinking.

“I still have them now, those little blonde moments – although soon they’ll be senior moments! That’s just me, I do say things and then think ‘Oh my God, that was a bit of a Helenism’,” she laughs, unconcerned by the ditzy image which probably had more to do with her dyslexia than any lack of intelligence.

“It’s six years ago this summer and it does feel like a long time ago. I look back and I think ‘Oh my God, I look so young!’, I feel like I’m going to need Botox soon.”

It was back in 2001 when we first caught a glimpse of the loveable 23-year-old who would win our hearts with inanities like “is there chicken in chickpeas?” and her wonderful “I like blinkin’, I do”.

Over her six-and-a-half weeks on the show the nation was gripped by her blooming relationship with fellow house mate Paul Clark, enthralled by her “dizzy blonde” persona, cheering on the Welsh girl who wondered whether dabbing your lips with a napkin made you posh. We loved her so much, she came runner-up to Brian Dowling in a slap-stick competition.

Since then she’s drifted in and out of the limelight. She’s done a few TV stints, as a beauty consultant on Lorraine Kelly’s breakfast show and a Big Brother reporter for GMTV. She popped up on programmes like Loose Women, Ready, Steady, Cook and Banzai. And, most recently, in 2004 in fact, she was a contestant on Celebrity Fear Factor UK alongside Paul and Big Brother 3 contestant, Spencer Smith.

But, these days, you won’t find her in the recording studio or at a modelling shoot, designing a new fashion range or launching a signature perfume. In fact, if you want to meet her all you need do is book an appointment at Saks in Portishead near Bristol and she’ll sort you out with a cut and colour or a short back and sides.

“I always wanted to be a hairdresser, I never wanted to be a TV presenter,” she says simply.

“I’ve still got an agent and I still do bits and pieces, a little bit of TV work but not, like, lots.

“There’s still things to do and things to talk about, especially in Wales. There’s charity appearances and TV shows and magazines. A little bit of moonlighting I call it. It starts around this time of year and goes on through the summer until September time and then dies down again.”

Helen knows her fame is less to do with talent than having been in the right place at the right time and she seems happy with that.

There’s no sense, talking to her, that she is courting more air time or column inches, that she is trying to be anything other than a bubbly blonde with a penchant for blinking.

Her conversation is still littered with “oh my God” and numerous interjections of the word “like” but that’s not because she’s trying to maintain the Helen image. Because there never was a Helen image per se – what you see is what you get.

Helen comes from a more innocent era, a time when Big Brother wasn’t the “get-famous-quick” scheme it is today.

For her, the show wasn’t a golden ticket to a life of celebrity parties but a chance to have some fun.

“I had always lived in Wales with my mam and I went straight into hairdressing and hadn’t been to uni, so I think it was just a way of spreading my wings and becoming a bit more experienced,” she says.

“It was a good lesson in life to be chucked in there and you do grow up. I’ve never gone back to living with my mam after that.”

If Helen expected adventure, she certainly didn’t expect to be thrown into a controversial romance which was responsible for drawing some of Big Brother’s highest ratings and included a late night assignation which still ranks among the most memorable reality TV moment in history.

Helen was in a relationship with Welsh sales engineer Gavin ‘Big G’ Cox when she entered the BB House. It was soon clear, however, that she and fellow house mate Paul, a car designer from Reading in Berkshire, had more than just platonic feelings towards each other.

Unbeknown to Helen, Big G got fed up with his girlfriend’s behaviour – which included cwtching up with Paul under the covers and flirting with him over a romantic candle-lit dinner – and dumped her publicly before she left the house.

Sure enough, and within weeks of the show ending, Helen moved in with Paul at his parents’ house; later they set up home together with their own place in Barnet, London.

It was the fairytale ending BB viewers had been waiting for, the perfect climax to several weeks of high tension, cliff hanger TV drama. But Helen admits it wasn’t always easy coping with the media attention, the paparazzi, the expectations and the general intrusion into their private lives.

“It was difficult because we came out and people were like ‘Oh my God, are you properly boyfriend and girlfriend?’ but we hadn’t even been for a meal together or been to the pictures together,” Helen says.

“Even though we knew each other so well it was like a relationship in reverse. We spent lots of time together, knew everything about each other and then had to do the normal dating thing.

“But if one of us wasn’t going through it, it would have been harder but because we were both going through it, it was a little bit easier.

“We could have a little moan or something and the other one would understand. And I think that made us more united, more stuck together.”

They braved the spotlight for longer than many media couples, granting just enough interviews to keep the celeb hungry public happy while trying to maintain as normal a life as possible.

But eventually, last summer, after five years together, Helen and Paul finally called it a day. At the time Paul told one celebrity magazine that the fame was starting to “drain” him.

“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,” he said.

“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.”

Helen’s account also lays much of the blame on the media.

“The fame thing did put huge pressure on it and I think also there was a huge pressure with marriage, so many stories saying ‘Helen’s buying wedding invitations’ and I think that made us think ‘no, we don’t want to get married’,” Helen admits.

“It was sad but I think what’s meant to be is meant to be. I couldn’t not be friends with him, though, we went through an experience together, we’re always going to have that.”

As she talks about Paul it is clear that Helen has fond feelings towards him and there is a hint of lingering sadness.

But with a will and a determination that leaves you in no doubt that this girl could survive anything, she is soon on to fresh topics, unwilling to dwell on the past for too long. Even losing the love of her life, it seems, hasn’t dented the positive outlook that charmed the viewing public back in 2001.

“I think everyone’s more upset about it than me and Paul!” she insists.

“We’re still really good friends, it was just one of those things. It was a case of get married or split up and we both knew we didn’t want to get married, it just wasn’t right. We actually get on better as friends than as girlfriend and boyfriend, so it’s probably better for us.”

Certainly Helen seems happy to have left London and is enjoying working in Bristol, planning the opening of a new franchise nearby with her current employers.

“I’m closer to my mum, close enough to pop home and have a cup of tea but far enough to have my independence,” she says.

“I mainly just do work and enjoy myself really. I’m not really a big planner. I don’t say ‘in five years time I want to be this’ because you never know what’s going to be happening in five years. I just go with the flow.”

And it seems that now she has managed to put her fame into perspective, maintaining a healthy profile without letting it become the overriding force in her life. Big Brother is, and probably always will be, a part of her life.

“But it isn’t the biggest part.

“Before, if I was to walk out I might get papped (pictures taken by the paparazzi) but now it doesn’t happen so much.

“Everyone still recognises me and people say ‘Oh I remember you then, that series was so good’.

“But the thing is, everyone’s really nice. It’s nice when people come up to you and say nice things.

“I’ve still got peoples’ phone numbers, I still speak to Stuart (a former BB house mate) now and again. If I walked past them in the street I would say ‘hi’ and maybe go for a drink with them. It would be nice to have a reunion,.

“There’s no bad feelings. I know in every season there’s people hating each other but not really in our group.

“When you look back at our group they’re quite normal. It was a major thing in ours for a gay person to win and now everyone’s, like, ‘whatever’.”

Like the rest of us, Helen has been fascinated by the changing face of Big Brother over the years. When the show launched in the UK in March 2000 it was hailed as the social experiment of the 21st Century, an on-screen science project which was described as a “real-life version of the Truman Show”.

Channel 4 maintained that sex, violence and swearing would be actively discouraged and a ‘compliance team’ was set up to monitor output and make sure it complied with ITC guidelines. Back then the tasks – which included keeping a fire alight, learning first-aid and training a dog to do tricks – were set to balance the mood in the house rather than encourage sex and cat fights.

“This will allow us to explore different aspects of their personalities,” Channel 4’s ‘science editor’, Dan Chambers, said at the time.

“Some of the tasks will involve leadership skills, co-operation, and so on.

“If a particular mood sets in and we need to change the atmosphere, we might put in a task which encourages team work. Or if people are sleeping in too late we might change the water supplies so hot water is only available until 8.30 in the morning.”

The house mates too were much more innocent. When the first series of contestants came out of isolation none of them could believe their reception, they weren’t expecting to be mobbed by a nation of newly converted Big Brother followers.

“The reception freaked me out,” confessed first series runner-up Anna.

“We had no idea, we didn’t have a clue what was going on. We thought there might be four or five people watching! We were completely overwhelmed by the crowd who had gathered to welcome us and stayed there in the pouring rain.”

And fellow house mate Darren added, “I didn’t realise the scale of this – I'm just taking a step back and want to resume reality... spending time with my kids and get some peace of mind.”

Now, of course, contestants enter the Big Brother house with the expectation of overnight fame and instant celebrity, which Helen says is the main difference between her group and those who will be entering the house next week.

“I don’t think they’re different, I think Big Brother are looking for more extreme characters each time and people have their eyes open to what they can get out of it,” she says. “Now people go in to get famous whereas we didn’t really know about that.

“The main thing is that now people know what they’re in for and are expecting too much afterwards. People come out and think they’re celebrities but all you did was live in a house and people watched you and now they know you. So you shouldn’t think you’re like J-Lo.

“I think we like to watch people who are a little bit naive rather than people who sit there thinking ‘if I say that I’ll be all over the papers’. Some people come out and say ‘Oh no, they edited me’ but they can’t edit you saying things if you didn’t say them. It all just depends on what sort of person you are.”

But she is aware that Big Brother can be manipulative when it comes to getting the kind of controversy the show needs to draw viewers and rating figures after so many years.

“We used to have a routine. We would have weekly tasks which would go on for a couple of days where we would have to learn something. Now they want the contestants to be bored, they just have the live task.

“We would have a little structure: Friday someone would go, we had Saturday off, Sunday was the task and that would last maybe until Wednesday, and then there were nominations. So we did have a bit of a routine.

“Now I think they don’t want them to have a routine so they will get bored so they’ll do more controversial things.”

Perhaps that’s the biggest surprise about Helen – the lack of controversy. We’ve grown so used to celebrity scandals, to sordid sex lives and illicit drug taking, wild parties, ‘blink and you miss it’ marriages and bitter divorce battles, that we don’t know what to do with someone who has tasted fame and is simply getting on with life.

Or perhaps it’s the fact that she hasn’t disappeared, a fate that has befallen a good majority of the 150 or so people who have passed through the Big Brother House. When was the last time we saw Jonny Regan, Ray Shah or Jason Cowan on the television, in the paper or even gracing the pages of a gossip weekly?

Helen has experienced Big Brother and survived. She has felt the sharp side of fame and has learned from it. But through it all she hasn’t lost her innocence, and it is this more than anything which has been key to her survival. Because even after all that the last few years have brought with them, she still sees the good in things and she’s still up for a laugh.

“Would I go on Big Brother again?” she muses. I think it may be like when you’ve been on holiday somewhere and you think ‘I’ll go back’ but it’s never the same. But I look back now and I think it was so amazing, I had such a good time, so I would never say ‘no I wouldn’t do it’.

“You never say never, do you?”

http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/0100n...name_page.html
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Old 26-05-2007, 02:53 PM #2
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Thanks for that its Nice to Hear From Her
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Old 26-05-2007, 02:57 PM #3
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Thanks for that, good interview ^_^
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Old 27-05-2007, 06:37 PM #4
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Thanks CC one of the best interviews she's done since the break up.
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Old 28-05-2007, 05:49 PM #5
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That was a really good, positive interview with Helen. I hope she really is happy.
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Old 05-06-2007, 11:38 PM #6
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I have a question. In the E4 programme about what the housemates did next they said Helen and Paul broke up in 2003?? But everything I read said last year. Does anyone know which one is true?
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Old 05-06-2007, 11:50 PM #7
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Quote:
Originally posted by Zinelle_Fan
I have a question. In the E4 programme about what the housemates did next they said Helen and Paul broke up in 2003?? But everything I read said last year. Does anyone know which one is true?
It was definatly 2006! They did a Heat exclusive,the progamme was just being stupid
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Old 05-06-2007, 11:57 PM #8
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Thanks for clearing that up!

I thought Big Brother knew everything
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