I know the toll that reality TV takes on the vulnerable
IT’S a lethal cocktail, far more potent t han t he espresso martinis served on the set of Love Island. Take a young woman who is suffering from anxiety and depression, and is on medication. She has rumoured money worries.
Offer her a lifeline: a substantial wad of cash to take part in a reality TV show. The exposure might lead to a new career, some stability, breathing space. She emerges from that show having sold her soul to be greeted by a barrage of online bullying: she’s a perfect target, what with the fake tan and the low BMI.
Problem is, work never really takes off. The rubber ring of fame deflates, punctured by the barbs of others. She missed her chance. No more offers drizzle in. She is in despair, and so she takes her own life, seeing no way out.
On Wednesday night, Sophie Gradon, a former Miss Great Britain and a contestant on ITV2’s Love Island two years ago, was found dead at her parents’ home near Newcastle. She had written a prophetic tweet just five days earlier: ‘I feel very deep tonight. Reflecting on life & what it means to live.’
She quoted a poem: ‘Because, my god, our time to live is l i mited, and I swear, good enough never is.’
She had been suffering from crippling anxiety and depression; one tweet struck a chord: ‘ Anxiety = doing nothing all day but your mind has run an entire bloody marathon.’ I expect she was exhausted.
Sophie was just 32 when she died, which is just a baby, really. But such is the pressure of earning a living from her beauty, she probably felt 50. My heart goes out to her family. I wish Sophie had called me, as she lived only up the road. Because I think I might have been able to help.
I wonder at the sanity of allowing someone who reportedly took anxiety medication to take part in a live TV show with 24-hour cameras, alcohol and a great deal of over-exposure.
Of course, the producers of Love Island insist contestants are grilled by therapists before they enter the set, and are debriefed once the show is over. The same is true of Celebrity Big Brother, which I took part in four years ago. But you have to factor in our desperation, otherwise why would we even put ourselves up for such things?
As a former anorexic, I’m used to pulling the wool over the eyes of health professionals. I had a drinking problem, too, but that didn’t stop me being given a glass of wine minutes before I went into the house. Like Sophie, I had money worries and severe anxiety.
I was terrified of being on live TV (I’d throw up every night in the only loo without cameras), but that was nothing to the terror of being hounded by creditors. I remember Christmas 2013, and the moment I got the call from my agent, saying I’d landed CBB, and exactly how big the fee would be.
I was at a bus stop, and felt with that news my life was about to change. I was so convinced it would all be OK I stuck out my hand and hailed a taxi for the first time in years. But of course, life isn’t that simple.
I emerged from t he programme to find out I’d been sacked from a job I loved and was good at. I never looked at the footage or the comments online, but still the odd one seeped under my virtual door (Sophie said once: ‘It’s hard not to look’): ‘Why did you devalue your brand by doing that programme?’ And ‘Are you sure you were born in 1958? We’re convinced you’re pre-war.’
I never saw a penny of my fee: it went straight to HMRC, and to my agent. When I got the news of my sacking, it was s u g a r e d wi t h p a t r o n i s i n g words: ‘You still have your boyfriend, your dogs.’ I’m sure Sophie, in her dark days, had friends and agents and managers tell her: ‘But you have a great boyfriend. You’re gorgeous!’ Neither pays the bills.
THERE is always much ridiculing of women who wear bikinis, false lashes so extravagant they can be seen from outer space, and who enter beauty pageants, especially in the age of #MeToo.
Sophie: I won Miss Zero Six 1976, so there’s no judging here. At least women like us have ambition: we get up every day and we try hard because we bel i e ve we a r e not ‘ good enough’. Looking like Sophie takes hard work but unfortunately anxiety doesn’t care how beautiful you are.
It nibbles away at anything that might be enjoyable – a holiday, a boyfriend – and makes you so afraid of all the things that could go wrong – a plane crash, him cheating – that everything turns to dust. I wish I had been able to hold Sophie’s hand, and tell her I know exactly what she’s going through. I would have told her this too will pass. But of course it’s now too late.