Shilpa Shetty - The Biography. Julie Aspinall
the latest Bollywood film, which offers an escape from normal life,’ said Mihir Bose, author of Bollywood: A History. ‘Actors like Shilpa Shetty cannot walk down the street without being mobbed by fans.’
The singer and dancer Honey Kalaria, now based in Britain, also tried to explain what life for Shilpa was really like. ‘Bollywood films give the viewer all the excitement, music, lavish sets and high drama audiences used to expect from Hollywood legends like Gene Kelly,’ she said. ‘Indian audiences, they won’t have it any other way!’ As for the actors: ‘Once you have a fan base, suddenly you have these audiences that are fans for life. We have quite close-knit communities and family groups, so you’ll find that, if one person says, “they’re great”, everyone else thinks so. It’s very rare that people will put a star down. There are lots of affairs going on and hot and spicy gossip but it’s funny how people really thrive on that. They just love it. In their own environment, they are the stars. They are the kings and the queens and they have millions of followers.’
In the event, of course, Shilpa’s gamble was to pay off spectacularly well. For a start, her age was no obstacle. Hollywood and its various European counterparts might be obsessed with age but at 31 Shilpa was still younger than Sharon Stone had been when she made her name in Basic Instinct (the type of role, incidentally, it is almost inconceivable Shilpa would ever take on). As for acting ability – well, what really is ability? As interest grew, in the West clips began to be shown of Shilpa doing what she does best – dancing – and looking quite spectacularly striking while she was about it. Perhaps she might not be the greatest actress ever to appear on the silver screen, but her appearance, talents and massively heightened profile meant that ultimately she played a very clever game.
There were 10 other inmates – ‘celebrities’ seems too far-fetched a word to use of all of them. They were Jermaine Jackson (elder brother of Michael), Ken Russell, the 79-year-old veteran filmmaker who had been a highly controversial figure in his youth, a couple of singers (Leo Sayer and Jo O’Meara), another rocker, Donny Tourette, Dirk Benedict, who made his name in The A-Team, musician Ian H Watkins, actress Cleo Rocos, columnist Carole Malone and Danielle Lloyd, a model recently stripped of her Miss Great Britain title. Right from the start, Shilpa cut an entirely different figure. Commenting that she would miss her entourage, the best body in Bollywood didn’t look overly thrilled when she saw the size of her bed (she was lucky to get one – there were 10 for 11 people), before being advised by Dirk to ‘let go’.
Some of the entrances into the house were dramatic, others less so. Donny Tourette of punk band The Towers of London merrily traded insults with the crowd outside while Danielle Lloyd, who had lost her title because she started a relationship with one of the judges, Teddy Sheringham, was booed. Ken Russell proclaimed himself a ‘Big Brother fan’, while Jo O’Meara, who had been in S Club 7 and was now a dog breeder, admitted to Davina, ‘I am absolutely terrified, I can’t tell you how scared I am.’
Not so Leo Sayer who announced as he went in it was ‘something to do in January in the rain’. Dirk Benedict took the whole thing a little more in his stride. He turned up in a large van, the replica of the one that had appeared in The A-Team, smoking a huge cigar. Fans waiting outside were ecstatic and huge cheers greeted him as he made his way into the house.
The early days were fairly uneventful. Shilpa kept nearly falling off her narrow bed, while an attempt at a meditation session with Ken ended when he suffered a coughing fit. Ironically, given the meal that was to be made of her own name, everyone, including the man himself, was amused at Shilpa’s inability to say ‘Dirk’ properly. Dirk, who appeared rather smitten, claimed he preferred her pronunciation to the correct one. The only other early controversy surrounded snoring, with each housemate accusing all the others of the crime, with Shilpa herself, very much to her surprise, dragged in. This is not how they behaved to stars in India, it seemed – but for now, all was pretty much calm.
It was not until a couple of days later that the real make-up of the house was revealed, and that came on day four. It had been an eventful day: for a start, Donny walked out. However, what really put the cat among the pigeons was the arrival of three brand-new and unexpected housemates: Jade Goody, who had become famous through her participation in the non-celebrity version of Big Brother in 2002, her boyfriend Jack Tweedy and her mother Jackiey Budden. Right from the start there were indications of rows to come. Jackiey addressed Shilpa as ‘Shil’, while Jade and Jack opted for ‘Shuppie’.
Viewers, however, were ecstatic at the entrance of the newcomers. Wildly popular among certain segments of the nation’s youth, Jade had become something of a role model for anyone wanting to take part in reality TV. Born and brought up in Bermondsey to a lesbian mother and a heroin addict father, who had died a couple of years previously, she was unquestionably Big Brother’s greatest success to date. And, indeed, it seemed as if there was something admirable about her. A former dental nurse, she laughed off the quite foul abuse she herself had been subjected to on her first time in the show. Shamefully, she left the house to viewers holding up posters saying, ‘Kill the pig’ and promptly put the money she had earned into being taught how to read and write. An unlikely career in the media followed, in which she went on to accumulate a multimillion-pound fortune, making herself a heroine along the way to everyone who had been born into a rotten background with seemingly no other way out. Big Brother had been the making of Jade: no one, least of all the lady herself, could have dreamed it would also prove her undoing.
Jade seemed supremely confident upon her entrance. ‘We’re the Goody family,’ she announced, before realising that none of the three housemates present had the faintest idea who any of them were – Shilpa and Jermaine were, after all, not English and Ken Russell didn’t look like a devotee of reality TV. ‘I’m Jade,’ she continued. ‘I was voted the 25th most infilential [sic] person in the world.’ With that, she removed herself to the Diary Room to recount how it felt to be back on the set of Big Brother.
There were hints right from the start that the new arrivals might not go down too well with the group already in situ. ‘The groups sized each other up – both unhappy at what they saw,’ Ken Russell wrote, in a very amusing memoir about the show. ‘The intruders saw a plump old codger with white hair, a handsome American and a slim maiden from the East. They smiled – we relaxed. Terrorists don’t smile, I thought (erroneously).’
Nor was the scenario Jade and co had walked into designed to relax the inhabitants and soothe any frazzled nerves. Endemol instigated a game called ‘Masters and Servants’. The masters – Shilpa, Ken and Jermaine, along with the newcomers – were to remain in the main house, while the servants – everyone else – were forced to move elsewhere. Servants were expected to wait on masters hand and foot; the masters, meanwhile, were all put up for eviction.
Shilpa had certainly been making her mark. Gaining herself the reputation of being a bit of a diva, she had already asked to change beds because, as a Hindu, she wasn’t supposed to sleep with her feet pointing south. She had also been spending some time in the kitchen – an activity that was to become the focal point of the furore – while chatting to Carole about washing up and Jermaine about dried fruits. When the two sets of people were separated, Shilpa gave way to a crying fit – distressed, it seemed, at losing some of her new friends.
It can only be imagined what she thought of the behaviour of the new ones. A four-poster bed was installed in the dormitory for the use of Jade and Jack, who, it appeared, were more than happy to make use of its inviting sheets. Shilpa was famously chaste, having only ever had one serious boyfriend (or perhaps two, if rumours were to be believed). Indeed, this was to become one of the many factors that set Shilpa and Jade apart in the show: the natural delicacy and fastidiousness of the former against the earthiness of the latter. In retrospect, it was bound to end in tears.
It didn’t take long at all for the real problems to begin. Jackiey either wouldn’t, or couldn’t, pronounce Shilpa’s name properly, giving rise to the first proper spat between the two of them in the loo. Shilpa, who by now had a cold, was chastened afterwards – ‘I never argue and here I am coming to England having a row,’ she said. ‘I should have kept my calm.’ She did, however, go on to reveal that