MEL
18/09/00
It was sadly overhead on the webcam today, as Tom was rehearsing as a guest at the auction.
Poor Mel has been in hiding over the past week at home. This is due to the public reaction to her.
She has also turned down a �50,000 modelling contract. Mel wants to get into TV work.
24/09/00
Mel when out for a drink with Andy
I
26/09/00
Mel Is on The Priory next week
I
02/10/00 (from the Sunday Times)
Big Brother made Melanie Hill one of the best-known faces in Britain and now she's a glossy magazine cover girl. She talks to Marie Claire editor LIZ JONES about flirting, fame and full-time bodyguards
WE'VE GOT MEL
It was a surreal moment. For two months, along with 10m other people, I had been watching an unknown 26-year-old called Melanie Hill take a shower, pluck her bikini line, snog boys, photocopy her breasts and flash her bottom. And here we were, only three days after her eviction from Channel 4's Big Brother house, having lunch in The Ivy. It was her first outing in public and she was clearly having difficulty adjusting to her new-found fame. In a restaurant where nobody bats an eyelid when Jennifer Aniston is picking at her endive salad, everyone was watching Melanie's every move.
"It still baffles me why so many people watched our lives in this house," she said. "When I got out, they ensconced me in a hotel and gave me all the papers to read. I am sure I've put a lot of people's backs up. I looked like such a bitch. I cried a lot on the Sunday after I got out when I read all the press, but once I started watching tapes of the show I could understand it. They only broadcast 4% of what they filmed - they wanted a romance, they wanted sex. I can't believe they showed me plucking my bikini line!"
I told her how we were all obsessed with her flirtations, first with her fellow housemate Andy, and then with Tom. "In the first week, all the girls got together to discuss the boys, and it was obvious none of us fancied any of them - well, maybe Darren. I got on well with Andy - we'd been to the same university, knew the same people - but I was never entirely comfortable with him touching me."
When I tell her that we all saw Tom's erection when he stood up, having given her a massage, she is mortified. "Oh no! I didn't see it at all!"
"I couldn't believe it when I got out of the house and Tom was brought into the studio, holding a red rose. I didn't want him to be there - my ex-boyfriend was only a few feet away in the audience. I fancied Tom, yes, but there was no way anything was going to happen between us. Just before he was evicted, they showed him kissing me. What they didn't show was me pulling away and saying, 'Now I can't go kissing all the men who leave the house, can I?'"
Her ex-boyfriend, Tim, was one of the reasons she applied, along with 20,000 others, to go on the show. Her job as a software sales and marketing executive meant she left home at 6.30am and was often away travelling, and their four-year relationship had suffered. "We never saw each other," she says now. "We split up because we were just too busy. I went on the show because I wanted to shake up my life, to get over my shyness. Before I went into the house my ex phoned me, and his last words to me were, 'I hope you're not going to kiss anyone in there.'"
She tells me that she now has a full-time bodyguard, laid on by Bazal, the programme-makers, and that the tabloids are camped permanently on the doorstep of her home in north London, where she lives with her mother. So why has she turned down a reported �150,000 to sell her story? "I didn't go into the house to get famous," she says. "Posing for a men's magazine or in a tabloid just isn't me."
So why was she always wearing a bikini, showing her bottom and hugging the boys? "I'm just not body-conscious at all," she says. "The cameras in the bathroom didn't bother me. I come from a very tactile family, I'm always hugging my mum and my friends."
She was shown all the offers from the press when she came out, and her only words were: "I'd like to be in Marie Claire." I had a phone call on the Monday after her eviction saying she would like to write a diary for us of the summer that changed her life.
The next day, we installed her in a studio, where she had make-up applied professionally for the very first time. "I never bothered in the house," she says. "They only allowed us to take in one lip liner, one shampoo and conditioner and one shower gel." When we showed her the Polaroids, she was amazed. "I didn't know I could look like that," she said. Her only payment was a big box of Aveda products.
The day after, she was smuggled into the offices of Marie Claire, where she delivered her diary - all 5,000 words of it - and was shown the picture of herself on the cover of our special Drop the Debt issue. She is modelling our T-shirt - designed by Giorgio Armani and worn inside by the likes of Alexander McQueen, Muhammad Ali and Puff Daddy - which we are selling to raise money for Jubilee 2000, which campaigns to free Third World countries from crippling poverty.
But having been on the cover of a glossy magazine, it seems that there is no going back to being an ordinary IT girl. She is going away with her best friend for a couple of weeks, and then, who knows? "My boss gave me unpaid leave to go on the show," she says. "Until I left the house, the only plans I had were to take a week's holiday before I went back to work. But I guess I won't be doing that. This was entertainment, but it became our lives."
The November issue of Marie Claire goes on sale on Oct 5
If you would like to help please click on the first couple of banner and sign up
