Real-life story about appearing on TV in THE SUN newspaper today.
First confession: I loved ITV’s Take Me Out show and every Saturday night watched it avidly. So I was incredibly disappointed when twins Cat and Sam Wilkinson contacted me to say they felt it was fixed by producers so they would never get a date.
Second confession: With their strange hair styles, odd dress sense and with seemingly very little to say for themselves, I wasn’t surprised they didn’t get a date. In fact, I admit I even sat there one day and said to my husband, ‘those two will be there for the duration’. And I was right. Fourteen weeks later and having been rejected by 52 men, Cat and Sam were there to the bitter end.
What is worrying, however – and a real eye opener for me who believes she isn’t the sort of viewer to be manipulated – is that Sam and Cat are nothing like the dim-wits they were edited to be on the show.
For a start, in real life they are clever and stunningly pretty – and they have 22 GCSEs at top grades between them and six A levels (all grade A). They are both studying at different unis (Sam is doing geography whereas Cat is studying Fashion and Brand management) and both are expected to get a first. Then while they are physically identical, many people when they meet them do not believe they are even twins. This is because they usually wear their hair in totally different styles – Sam is usually dark with straight hair and Cat is a curly blonde (not a frizzy one though – those styles, they say, were made by the show…) They also always dress in individual clothes – not, according to them, that they were allowed to wear them.
In fact, I never realised the show’s stylist (?) bought all their outfits – one they were made to wear said Smart on one dress and Cookie on the other.
The girls constantly begged producers to be allowed to be themselves, stand apart and dress as they usually do – but were only given this permission right at the end of the show (when the man DID choose one to be in his top two girls and had no idea they were twins…)
In the meantime, they say they become the victims of a vicious online bullying campaign thanks to the programme.
For their part the producers have said in fact everyone on the programme is helped to look their best and get a date. But the motto of this tale seems to be that some reality TV might be anything but…
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