A FORMER Celebrity Big Brother contestant who says she was in the “most explosive series ever” has spoken out, calling it both “brilliant and horrendous”.
Loose Women star Nadia Sawalha was on the 2015 series of the show, and joined the likes of Fatmoon Scoop, Michelle Visage, Katie Hopkins, Calum Best and Patsy Kensit.
American actor Jeremy Jackson also got the boot from the Big Brother house for inappropriate behaviour during the dramatic series.
And as a new batch of Big Brother contestants hit our screens this week, Nadia opened up on her experience in the house.
She told The Sun: “It’s funny because I never watched any of it when I came out and just couldn’t bear it. But my daughter, like a couple of months ago, went, ‘mum, just watch this’. And it was a load of highlights.
“And I’m not kidding. I watched it. And I was like, ‘bloody hell, you’re just exactly yourself’.
“You know, when people go, ‘I’m going to go in and I’m going to be true to myself’. And I just like never really understand what that means. It really made me laugh because my family are going ‘Yeah, you’re exactly like you are’.
“So I thought, ‘Oh, that’s quite a success’.”
The 59-year-old continued: “It’s horrendous. And it’s brilliant. And I always say it because it really is true.
“That it is so easy to judge before you’ve done reality. But when you do it, it’s so, so, so different.
“I was excited because I’ve done lots of acting and I’ve been in lots of different casts for years. I was very much a lone presenter on BBC. And I hated it.
“I love being with a cast. I’m like, Oh, brilliant. Great. So I have such a laugh and be chatting all day finding out people’s stories.
“And it was the most explosive one ever.”
Nadia went so far as comparing it to Loose Women, on which she’s a regular panellist, and said: “You want like a magnifying glass on society. You want like every kind of person that you can. It’s a bit like Loose Women.
“It’s a bit like a soap. You know, you’ve got somebody there you love, somebody that you hate, somebody that you’re always annoyed with, somebody that you agree with everything.
A brand new batch of Big Brother housemates are living it up in the famous compound.
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“That’s what I think is part of our 25 year survival. You never quite know what’s going to happen. And that’s why these reality shows and the early Big Brothers, they really were just watching people like guinea pigs.
“I love it. I’m a people watcher.”
Meanwhile, away from screens, Nadia has been leading a campaign to raise £150,000 for legal costs to appeal a decision that means thousands of women will miss out on a life-extending cancer drug.
Enhertu – which is used to treat patients like them in 25 countries including Scotland – was denied for use on the NHS by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) due to its cost.
It’s estimated to be around £10,000 per patient per year in the US where it is available to cancer patients.
Nadia’s close friend Hannah Gardner, 37, whom she calls her ‘daughter’, is currently on Enhertu as part of a clinical trial that sees her also having to take a more toxic drug as part of its conditions.
So far, the mum-of-one’s tumours have responded well to the life-extending medicine, but the delay in getting onto the trial allowed her stage 4 cancer to spread.
Nadia explained why the group is having to self-fund lawyers to contest NICE’s decision.
She said: “Big Pharma told us that NHS England have been offered it [Enhertu] at the lowest price of anyone else that’s taken Enhertu. And so that’s NICE then, who are in charge of approving.
“I was in the [Royal] Marsden many times with Hannah and them saying, ‘oh, well, it will come through. There’s always a bit of this back and forth and it will come through’.
“You know, it’s an amazing drug. Nothing’s had this reaction since Herceptin, which we know has saved hundreds of thousands of women’s lives.
“So everybody thought it was a dead cert, but what happened is there’s something called a severity modifier; if you imagine, secondary breast cancer was in the column of a severe disease and there was a certain pot of money for that, but they moved it across the column to moderately severe. Now there is no cure for secondary breast cancer.
“So for those women to be told that their disease wasn’t severe and was only moderate and that that pot of money that was over there is now no longer available to buy this drug was just devastating.”
