Nikki Grahame is proof that instant fame rarely makes a difficult situation easier

One of the worst things about life after Big Brother, Nikki Grahame once said, was having to fake a smile when your world was secretly unravelling.

“Sometimes it was hard,” she stated last year “When I was struggling in the past with personal issues, you would always have the press picking up on it and writing about it.”

Grahame, who has passed away aged 38 after a life-long battle with anorexia, spoke from painful personal experience. She’d enjoyed her appearance on Big Brother in 2006, in which she finished fifth. The aftermath proves more challenging.

“When I was going through a tough time, it was hard to put on a smile when I got recognised in the street,” she told the Guardian. “Or have to go on stage and be all happy-clappy.”

The issue of aftercare for reality TV contestants is a major talking point today. A series of tragedies involving ratings-winning franchises such as Love Island has forced broadcasters to take seriously the subject of mental health. In 2018 former Love Island contestant Sophie Gradon hung herself. Twelve months later, Mike Thalassitis, who had appeared on the same show, died by suicide. As did Love Island presenter Caroline Flack in 2020. In the US meanwhile more than 20 former reality contestants are believed to have taken their own lives.

That's not to suggest that appearing on Big Brother was the cause of Grahame’s death. At the time, she credited the show with saving her life and helping her escape the shadow of anorexia. Grahame had spent much of her adolescence and early adulthood in “institutions and clinics”. Big Brother had been a different sort of refuge, and she had loved it.

“When I finally came out at 19 I had nothing going for me – I had no social skills, I had no education, nowhere to live and I literally started from scratch,” she told ITV in 2017.

“It was so daunting and I did relapse several times because I needed to go back to what I knew and I'd grown up in those places – I felt comfortable being there after all that time and Big Brother literally opened up my world to everything.”

Grahame was just seven when she had developed an eating disorder for the first time.

“I was doing gymnastics…and I started to feel self-conscious in my leotard," she said in a 2009 interview with New! magazine. “One day one of the girls told me my bum looked fat and the instructor said I was useless. I thought that if I stopped eating I would become a better gymnast.”

With her weight plummeting, her parents sent her to the children’s eating disorder’s unit at Maudsley psychiatric hospital in London. Aged 12 she tried to take her life. In the years that followed she continued to have issues with eating disorders. Then came Big Brother, where she gained a cult following after going on a rant about fellow housemate Susie Verrico in the Diary Room.

Big Brother had, Grahame felt, given her opportunities she would otherwise not have had (as well as the earning power to buy her own flat). She returned to the house in 2010 for the series Ultimate Big Brother, in which she finished second. Her popularity also led to her starring in her own E4 series, Princess Nikki, in which she embarked on such unlikely escapades as deep sea fishing and mountain rescue.

Grahame had struggled with her mental health long before Big Brother. However, the media attention brought additional pressures, as did the plunge back to obscurity that followed. It is impossible to say what kind of life she would have had without Big Brother – or whether she would have eventually conquered her eating disorder.

But we do know that instant fame rarely makes a difficult situation easier – and the celebrity industry of 15 years ago was happy to cast aside without a second thought the people it had elevated.

“When you’re up there and you’re having a great time, working your socks off, it’s marvellous,” Nikki’s mother Sue told the Daily Telegraph last month after the launch of a GoFundMe campaign to help with her daughter’s treatment. “But then it can stop. And Nikki said she did feel quite lost when it stopped.”

For advice and support on anorexia, contact Beat, the UK’s eating disorder charity