Читать книгу Shilpa Shetty - The Biography - Julie Aspinall - Страница 7

Just a couple of weeks earlier, the world was intrigued when a slim and very striking Bollywood actress became the first-ever Indian star to enter the Big Brother house. A household name across Asia, Shilpa Shetty was almost entirely unknown in the West and initially, at least, not a great deal of information was forthcoming. Known to be 31, with a black belt in karate, and ‘the best body in Bollywood’, Shilpa came, quite literally, from a different world to that of everyone else present in the house. Above all, of course, was the contrast between Shilpa and the Goody clan that was not only going to electrify viewers, but also very nearly caused an international incident. Her beauty, intelligence, class and education highlighted only too well her new housemates’ lack of all those qualities with explosive results.

But, back at the beginning, Shilpa had no idea what she was going to find in the house. Clad in a glamorous green sari, with full Bollywood make-up and jewellery, she waved at viewers as she made her way into the house, exotic as a peacock among the homegrown sparrows already in situ. ‘I have zero expectations,’ she said. ‘The only thing I really hope is to keep my self-respect and my dignity.’ She could have had no idea quite how severely the two were to be tested before her time in the house was up.

Given that Shilpa was clearly no ordinary housemate, it was no surprise that her contract was not that ordinary either. Negotiated under the firm eye of her mother Sunanda, who’d apparently had doubts about letting her daughter go into the house, it ensured Shilpa was being paid an estimated £357,000 to take part. Given the fact that standards of behaviour in the house were frequently on the low side, there were other clauses written into her contract, too: she would not wear a bikini, have to join the others in the pool or eat meat on Thursdays (in accordance with Hindu religion). Nor would she have to drink an excessive amount of alcohol or kiss anyone, men and women alike, on the lips. ‘I had seen some extracts from a previous year and I knew it could get pretty raunchy,’ said Sunanda. ‘In one scene, I saw a young girl being egged on to drink alcohol until she was so drunk she fell out of the shower semi-naked in a very undignified way. I did not want Shilpa to be forced to do anything that would let her country down.’

Whatever Shilpa was bringing to the house, it was clearly going to be something pretty different from the exhibitionist drunken behaviour of past contestants. Ironically, her well-behaved and modest demeanour was to give rise to a good deal of soul searching on the outside about where British womanhood had gone wrong.

The world outside was certainly impressed. Shilpa was variously described as ‘beautiful’, ‘graceful’ and a ‘lovely Indian lady’. Everyone was intrigued, too. Although she was known to be an actress, that was practically all British viewers knew about her and stories began to circulate about the style in which she lived; the exact level of her fame and what really lay behind her desire to enter the house. Davina McCall, as usual, was instigating the proceedings; she asked Shilpa what she hoped to achieve. ‘I want to clear out the misconception of Indian people,’ Shilpa replied. ‘We are modern, intelligent and glamorous. I want all of India to be proud of me.’

She probably achieved that along with a great deal of Britain becoming rather ashamed of itself. At that stage, three of the housemates were missing – indeed, for several days no one would have a clue that they were going to turn up – but what Shilpa managed to do was present a face of India that was far more attractive than anything put forward by the West. Dignified, intelligent, sophisticated and, for want of a better word, classy, she soon proved herself to be everything the other housemates were not – with, as the world now knows, explosive results.

And, really, the biggest benefit to what was to turn into an ordeal was exposure to the West. Shilpa made no secret of her desire to act in Western films as well as Indian ones, and now was her chance to show herself off to both filmmakers and the audience who could take her career that one step ahead. The loud-mouthed comedian Russell Brand, who was hosting a spin-off show called Big Brother’s Big Mouth, said as much: ‘This is her chance to show herself to a Western audience,’ he commented.

Not everyone, however, was impressed. For a start, Shilpa’s own parents were said to be hardly delighted about her decision to join the house. ‘I did not want her to go,’ said her mother, Sunanda. ‘I have always travelled with her and this is the first time she has gone away to work without me there to protect her. She’s a very spiritual and gentle girl who, despite her age, has always been very sheltered from the harsh aspects of life.’

One person who felt the experience would do Shilpa good – and, rather ironically, put her finger on just what it was that was to lead to such a contretemps was her younger sister Shamita. ‘Shilpa is used to living like a princess,’ she later said. ‘This experience will prove to be just the strengthening tonic she needed to shake her out of her domestic cocoon.’

Others in the industry looked on in frank disbelief (initially, that is). ‘If I was Shilpa, I would shoot my agent for getting me into this without finding out enough about the programme,’ said one.

But clearly Shilpa felt she could do with the exposure. She was also getting well rewarded, but, given that she was paid more than her Big Brother fee for every film she made, and she’d made 51 before entering the house, she didn’t need the money, either. A whole new career in the West seemed to be what was at stake.

And it was a risk. It later emerged that Shilpa was not the first Bollywood star to be approached by Endemol: at least two other major names were said to have turned down an invitation to appear on the show because they were worried about the impact it would have on their careers. There was also a certain amount of debate about how famous Shilpa really was. Initially presented as being top of the A-list, that turned out to be a bit of an exaggeration: many Bollywood insiders believed that, although she was only 31, her career might have been past its best and this was a last-ditch attempt to get noticed in the West.

‘She is known for her body and her face, not her acting,’ said Rekha Ahuja, a film producer who worked in Bollywood for a decade and a half. ‘She is more of a Penelope Cruz than a Nicole Kidman, but she’s a sex symbol for young men, who plaster her posters all over their walls. There is no doubt that she still sells cinema tickets but at her age I imagine that’s why she wants to try to sell herself to the American or European film market. I don’t think she’s good enough, but I admire her for trying.’

Another person who felt that Shilpa was using the show to give her career a new lease of life was Anil Dharker, a socialite based in Bombay and someone with first-hand experience of show business – his daughter Ayesha played the lead role in the London musical Bombay Dreams. ‘She is not an A-plus star, she is more in the A-minus,’ he said. ‘But, in a country with several hundred movie stars, only a handful are considered to be true superstars. She is not among the elite.’

Others were a lot more complimentary. ‘Everyone, from these people in the urban centres to those in the smallest villages, will see 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 her little sister Shamita had told her not to ‘take any shit from anyone’.

At that stage, however, it didn’t seem to go any further than that. Dirk still appeared to have a serious crush on the actress, actually blushing when he was teased about it. Ken, meanwhile, was responsible for the next real shock. Following in Donny’s footsteps, he walked off the show, complaining that he simply could not deal with the vulgarity and mouthiness of Jade and her family. This caused quite a stir and, given that Ken, possibly more able to look after himself than anyone else in the household, simply couldn’t bear the proximity with Jade and her crowd, it speaks volumes for Shilpa that she actually managed to stay the course. She went on to have far more to complain about than he ever did and bore it with extraordinarily good grace.

What finally prompted his departure was a row about food: he helped himself to some crackers, an action to which Jade took offence – technically one of the servants should have served him his food. Soon afterwards, he walked out, calling himself ‘fuddy duddy’ and saying that some of the surprises were ‘a little too much to take’. No one was under any illusion as to which ‘surprises’ he was talking about; afterwards, he described Jade’s onslaught as ‘a non-stop stream of top-of-the-lungs abuse that was both unwarranted and obscene’. Ken might have been one of the major controversialists of the day in his time, but he couldn’t take such ill-educated vulgarity, and it was left to Carole to tell the others he’d left the set. ‘He was a lovely old man,’ she said. ‘I shall miss him.’

Jade then accidentally broke Shilpa’s glasses. Ominously, it was revealed that her grandparents were to visit the show. The introduction of Jade who – oh, the irony of it – only became a celebrity herself by appearing on the programme, along with her loud and noisome family, was always going to be interesting, to say the least. Clearly, it never occurred to anyone that this ploy might be so successful as to make headlines all over the world. Even a generation ago, the idea of someone like Jade finding a national platform, let alone becoming the centre of attention to politicians and public alike, would have been quite laughable.

But we live in a different society now; one created in part by the makers of Big Brother, that exercise in voyeurism masking itself as a social experiment, which has done so much to make crude behaviour mainstream. The Goody clan’s antipathy to Shilpa contained the seeds of something really nasty, and perhaps because of this the ratings were shortly to go through the roof.

It was still not obvious what was beginning to happen, however. Indeed, the real interest regarding Shilpa continued to be Dirk’s obvious attraction to her, even though, at 61, he was 30 years her senior. Dirk was aware of this, too: ‘Even my belt is older than her,’ he sadly told Leo.

But it was clearly on his mind. Asked by Danielle if there could be a happy ending, he remarked, ‘There already is. Naaaah, I’ve been flirting with her, I tease her; it makes her happy. Isn’t that good? For me it’s nothing. When a man meets a woman, it’s always the woman that decides. There may be dinner, but it doesn’t matter what he does. He can do whatever he can to convince her he is a good guy to be with – even today when the girl does all the stuff.’

It was clearly going to be no dice, though. Shilpa had already told the others – who were only too keen to pass it on to Dirk – that she was only interested in marrying a fellow Indian, to say nothing of the fact that she wasn’t interested in an older man.

Perhaps it was the fact that a bona fide Hollywood star was interested in her, albeit one a little past his heyday, or maybe because she appeared to be getting on equally well with Jermaine that around this time there were the first indications that some ugly jealousy was beginning to stir. Danielle’s suggestion that Shilpa and Dirk get married live on air in Big Brother was greeted with hysterics by Shilpa, after which the other women present began to take an altogether bitchier look at the most glamorous woman in their midst. There was some speculation as to what Shilpa earned from her films, as well as the true nature of her star status. Shilpa had apparently compared herself to Angelina Jolie – not, perhaps, the best way of endearing herself to her fellow housemates – a claim the others were only too happy to dispute. Even so, there was still no hint as to quite how nasty matters were to become.

The following day, the atmosphere began to worsen. A mini-row broke out between Jackiey and Shilpa, over ordering a bottle of lemon juice from the food store. Shilpa, said Jackiey, was too controlling. At this point, Jade and Danielle joined in, deciding Shilpa was too bossy. Shilpa looked utterly bewildered by the venom but contented herself with saying that, in India, this conversation would not have taken place. With commendable self-control, she managed not to retaliate, saying she would not shame her parents by indulging in such abuse herself.

Some days later, after Jackiey’s departure, Shilpa’s mother Sunanda commented on how well her daughter had behaved. ‘Her [Jade’s] mother and I could not be farther apart,’ she said. ‘I found her to be very obnoxious. And when Jackiey was rude to Shilpa, she maintained her dignity because, over here, you don’t mistreat your elders.’

Ouch! Could anything have been calculated to dig deeper at the hapless Jackiey? Not only had she been rude and insulting to a visitor to her country but one who was a lot younger than her too.

By this point, the only other woman present who seemed to be sticking up for Shilpa was Carole, advising her to stay out of Jackiey’s way. This might have been the first moment at which Shilpa herself began to have qualms about what was going on: ‘I don’t know what I am doing here,’ she admitted. ‘It is not really my scene … I do like most of the people here.’

Alas, it was not a sentiment reciprocated in all quarters. Though the men still seemed pretty enamoured of her, the women were beginning to show a very unpleasant tendency to gang up.