by Adam Williams

Nick Bateman admits he wasn't
expecting too much when he made it onto the first ever series of
Big Brother.

He said: “Ten people that no one
knows, sitting in a house and just talking, who don’t know each
other, how can that be interesting?

“It’ll only be watched by students
and insomniacs.”

The 42-year-old, from
Wickhambreaux, near Canterbury spoke to the Kentish Gazette this
week as he looked back on life in the original house and during
this summer's finale to the Channel 4 reality show.

In 2000, his decision to “live
by the sword and die by the sword” in the original series proved
his downfall, as he was thrown out for attempting to fix
nominations.

Overnight he becomes the biggest
news story of the year.

“It was surreal and strange, in the
immediate aftermath, the show’s producers sat me down and said,
'here are the papers’. I was front page in every one, apart from
the Financial Times, where I was page three.

“What struck me was, 'this has to
be a joke’ and secondly, around the same time, Concorde had crashed
in Paris killing all on board and a Russian submarine (Kursk) was
stranded at the bottom of the Arctic Sea, with 59 sailors about to
die.

“I released then how trivial news
can be, a game show was front page news, but a human-factor story
where 59 people are dying, was on page 35.

“It was bizarre to see your name in
print, on Ceefax, walking around in public the following day with a
baseball cap on and in a blacked-out car, with people suddenly
knowing who you were.

“It was a paradox, on one side it
was great, but then in some situations it was really
claustrophobic, like on the tube.”

The public eventually turned their
attentions elsewhere and Fulham fan Nick decided to invest his
gains from fame and publicity in property across east Kent.

In 2006, he moved back to Wickhambreaux from
London and married wife Lynnette in the same year.

Walking his dog by the village
lakes one summer’s morning this year, Nick’s mobile rang and
Channel 4 producers come calling again with an offer to appear in
the Ultimate Big Brother series, with other former housemates and
celebrities.

He said: “I didn’t want to do it
and right up to the week before, I still didn’t want to go. I
thought, 'why do it, why go back?’

“Literally three days before, my
wife said to me, 'you will watch this programme and you will regret
not doing it’.”

“I’ve always had this mantra that
the things you don’t do are the things you regret."