‘Big Brother’s Christopher: ‘Mark, weight issues and Madonna’

Northern Irish lad Christopher Hall was one of this summer’s most likeable Big Brother housemates, remaining calm and considered when others could be gobby (Helen), argumentative (Helen) or cruder than an episode of The Inbetweeners (OK, Helen again). He didn’t always see eye-to-eye with the formidable Helen or nearly as formidable Pauline, and also enjoyed a sort-of-relationship with fellow housemate Mark Byron, so I had plenty to ask Christopher about when I called him for a post-Big Brother debrief earlier this week.

I looked at your Twitter to see what you’ve been up to since leaving the house, and you just seem to be necking the G&Ts
“I know! It’s all I’ve been doing, seriously. I disappeared on Saturday and I woke up at 11 the next day in a bar in Farringdon thinking ‘How the hell did I get here? What the hell happened?!’”

So how are you doing after leaving the house?
“It hasn’t really hit me yet that I’m out. I’m staying in my mate’s place and just looking around everywhere thinking ‘wow, this looks really different’. There’s things to look at! You just get so bored pottering around the same house all the time and you get used to the same surroundings. So it’s very different.”

I suppose it’s not like you’re coming back to a normal life either – it’s a different reality from before you went in.
“Yeah, definitely. I’m just taking advantage of it really. I’m kind of wandering round everywhere, I’m like a child. I went down to Tesco yesterday and I was really excited about being in the supermarket and being able to buy what I wanted – all the things they wouldn’t allow us to get on the shopping list. I was like, ‘Yeah, I can buy a jar of mayonnaise now!’. It’s a basic thing but I was excited.”

It must be nice having a phone to play with again, too!
“Yeah, it’s been glued to my hand, I haven’t let it out of my sight! I just wanted it in the palm of my hand. I missed my music so much, so I’ve been on iTunes checking out all the music that I’ve missed all summer. All I wanted to know was, has Madonna released any new music? And the bitch hasn’t! So I was depressed about that.”

What made you apply to go on Big Brother in the first place?
“I always wanted to apply, and this was just the year I got round to doing it. I’ve been a life-long fan of the show, but this year I gave myself a boot up the arse and said ‘just go for it’. I didn’t ever expect to get in. But somehow it happened and they rang me up two weeks before [the show started] and said ‘you’re a housemate!’”.

You said you were surprised to get in, but you went pretty much all the way and came third. In the final couple of weeks did you think ‘actually, I might have a chance to win this’?
“Yeah, I did actually. In there literally I just took it from week to week, because I found it really tough [at the start]. I’m so used to choosing my friendship groups really carefully. It was very difficult to have a conversation with the extremely loud-mouthed people that you can’t get a word in edgeways with, so I didn’t like it very much in the early weeks. But when I got as far as week seven I thought ‘Fuck yeah, I’d really love to be in the final.’”

You mentioned the early weeks there – Pauline really seemed to have it in for you at the start…
“Yeah, she didn’t like me. It all stemmed from one stupid throwaway comment, that’s where her dislike for me started. She was Matron in that kitchen – she controlled it, she had the whole place on lockdown and no-one said anything to her. She’d be looking over your shoulder saying ‘oh I wouldn’t do that, I wouldn’t add that ingredient to that’. And it’s like, I know you’re 49 and I know you’re kind of the mum in the house but at the end of the day everyone can look after themselves really. I said one thing to her one day, ‘Look Pauline, I’m just gonna do this for myself’. And it just started from there.”

It was quite an antagonistic house this summer, and we even saw the winner, Helen, being booed as she left the house. From a viewer’s perspective, she was quite entertaining to watch, but I’m guessing she was terrible to live with.
“She did actually have some nice moments. There are many things you wouldn’t have seen of her, I’d imagine, where she was a really sweet girl. That being said, it wasn’t easy to live there a lot of the time because she was extremely argumentative. Even having a conversation with her would be impossible at times. She really loved the sound of her own voice in many ways. She’d have an opinion on a topic and she’d go on and on about it, but she wouldn’t necessarily know a lot about it. You felt a lot of the time as though you were being talked at. A lot of the guys in her friendship group were quite passive and they were fine with that. People like Ash and Winston let her do the talking and they never said anything against her.”

But there were redeeming moments?
“She was not all bad, she was far from all bad. But whenever she got upset about something she was relentless. It would go on all evening. One evening Ashleigh upset her and I think she started talking about her at 7pm, and she was still going off on one at 11pm. Sometimes you thought that you got on really well with her, because you’d have a really good day. She’d be funny, have a chat, and she’d seem like a normal person. But then she’d just call someone a bitch or a thief or a liar, and then start talking about them for hours on end and I’d think, ‘Seriously? You’ve ruined it for yourself again. We’re back to square one.’”

Mark was obviously in Helen’s friendship group, and he was also very close with you. How do you resolve that, then? He was kind of in two camps, one of which you didn’t get on with very well.
“Mark always said he was everyone’s friend in the house and that was something that annoyed me about him [to start with]. He seemed a little conceited, I guess, in the early weeks. Also Helen seemed to get in the way a lot of the time. Mark would come over to me and say ‘I’ve just been chatting to Helen’, and I’d be like ‘For fuck’s sake, again?’. She always seemed to divide us. I’m not out to get the girl, seriously, but she was always sticking her oar in when it was not wanted. She always had an opinion on my relationship with Mark, and she obviously always picked Mark’s side. Everyone was just so biased towards him in there.”

What do you think it was that brought you and Mark together? I spoke to Matthew a few weeks ago and he’s claiming responsibility for you two bonding…
“Yeah, we bonded straight after Matthew left. We’d never have gotten as far as we had, had Matthew still been in the house. Mark adored Matthew. I think he had a little crush there! He’d follow Matthew around the house like a little lost puppy all day. Mark needs a sidekick, he freely admitted that. So Mark and I would sit for hours on end while he was in the bath or just, like, chilling out in the garden. That was only really possible after Matthew left. The night Matthew left, Mark was really upset and he got really drunk, and said ‘Will you come and lie with me in bed?’. That was the first time we held hands, under the covers. We woke up the next day and I thought ‘yeah that was definitely a one-off, there’s no way he’s interested in me’ and I hadn’t even thought of Mark in that way before.”

Why not?
“He’s not the kind of guy I’d usually go for. In terms of personality, definitely not. I do think he’s attractive, but personality-wise I never really found him that attractive. I thought he was hilarious, but he’s not the kind of guy I’d want to date. Normally the kind of guy I go for is a probably a little bit more… boring. A little more academic, you know what I mean? Someone who I could talk through stuff that’s in the news and current affairs – and I didn’t do that with Mark. That was another hidden turn to our relationship, the things he didn’t want to talk about. Like Mark didn’t know anything about anything he wasn’t interested in getting to know. After Matthew left we got a heck of a lot closer. And it was like, a week or two before Big Brother noticed there was anything going on between us. It just looked as though we were being close as mates, but then at night we’d hold hands, or we’d kiss under the pillows.”

Obviously a big turning point for you both was the task where you heard what the public thought of your relationship, specifically the suggestion that Mark was dragging you around like a toy. You seemed to kind of flip at that point.
“I don’t really know what changed. I think I just got sick of being treated as a mug. Before I came in [the house] my friends all trusted me, so I felt respected before I went in there. But that task just topped it off for me, it was the last straw. I just felt like a massive doormat. I’d given Mark a lot of leeway and a lot of courtesy. He’d spoken to me about how hard he found it to talk about relationship stuff or to have a kiss on TV. I felt that I respected that. I didn’t want to force him to do anything on TV he wasn’t comfortable with. He’s not as comfortable perhaps in his sexuality, or there’s things his family don’t know and he doesn’t want to wash his dirty linen in public as such. So that’s why I just left it. But I got to the point where Mark didn’t realise how much respect I was showing him. He kept coming over and saying ‘you disrespected me by not standing up for me in a task’. And I thought, ‘Hold on, you have no idea how much I’ve done for you, how much I’ve put myself on the back-burner and prioritised you in every single way’. And I felt that I wasn’t getting any of that respect back. Then I thought ‘Fuck it. I’m just going to say everything that’s on my mind with him as well, and if he wants a row with me he’ll fucking well have one.’ I thought I needed to stick up for myself a little bit more, and just for my own self-satisfaction it would do me some good to get it off my chest.”

Since you came out of the house, have you had time to talk to Mark and assess things? Have you got a clearer idea of the relationship you want with him now?
“I’ve really no idea, I’ve only seen him a little bit. On Friday evening [after the final] he came over and gave me hugs and stuff. But then [the production team] made me go back to the hotel, so I didn’t get a chance to talk to him. He’s sent me private messages on Twitter, saying that he would like to talk and he’s excited about seeing me. But he did kind of undermine everything by bitching about my friends on Twitter. He cannot stand my friends. He said they were shooting him looks and calling him the dickcheese of East Bloc or something like that. I was like ‘okay Mark, cheers, just leave it’. I couldn’t really be arsed with it as well. It’s really disrespectful to me to slag off two of the people I’m closest to in the world. Again, that annoyed me.”

That reminds me, Mark’s soothsayer abilities – was that for real?
“You tell me, I’ve no idea.”

Well, he asked you pick a number between 1 and 3 and you just burst out laughing, which is the correct reaction, but then he got really annoyed.
“I really don’t know. The thing is I’ve never met anybody like him before. He’s extremely unique and a lot of the time I just went along with it, because there’s nothing else to do in there. Mark was the entertainer, he always wanted to do something. He turned up the Mark showbiz jazz hands persona sometimes, but I don’t even know if it was a persona because he was like that 24/7. That made me think maybe he is genuine, maybe he is really like this. But sometimes he would just crank it up. I don’t really know. I honestly don’t know if he genuinely is like that, if he does believe he is psychic or he’s not, I’m none the wiser. Ten weeks on, I’m really not.”

One of my favourite tasks in there was the bad piggy task. How embarrassing was that for you?
“Incredibly degrading. They made us go into the task room and then Luisa just appeared out of nowhere. It was funny. I just got stuck right in, I really loved the tasks in there. The only housemate that wouldn’t have done anything like that was Chris who said ‘I’m not letting the runner-up on The Apprentice tell me what to do!’. It just made me laugh. I wasn’t one of Luisa’s fans but I thought it was alright, I just kind of went along with it.”

You seemed to have a twinkle in your eye, I think you quite liked it.
“It was funny! I didn’t mind it, I just thought it was really harmless. I just went with it. I knew what Big Brother was about. It always used to annoy me when housemates would go in and say ‘I can’t do that! It’s degrading, it’s embarrassing.’ You’re on Big Brother, it’s fine, it’s not highbrow television! Just get stuck in.”

One thing I noticed is that whenever you went into the pool you always kept your top on. Is there a reason behind that?
“Yeah, definitely. I’ve had weight issues my entire life, I was always the fat kid in school. Then I went from being the fat kid to being the kid who was quite dainty and thin. I starved myself when I was fifteen and I dropped like 5 or 6 stone. I was wandering around living on apples and black coffee. I was eating next to nothing and lost shitloads of weight. It’s kind of something I’ve never really addressed properly, my weight issues. My weight fluctuates like crazy, year in year out. I’ll go up by two stone over a few months and I’ll think ‘right, time to do something about that’, so I’ll start under-eating and I’ll go out and run like crazy. My weight fluctuates like that all the time. It also stems from the fact I don’t really have a very high opinion of myself, body-wise. It’s something I’ve never really addressed.”

You mentioned after you left the house that now you need to find a job. What do you think is next for you and what sort of job are you looking for?
“I’ve absolutely no idea! Before I went in I’d just done my Masters in Journalism at City. I was working, I did bits at Channel 4 News and in newsrooms around the country, as well as internships and work experience. I only found out yesterday that I passed my Masters! I’ve literally no idea what’s been going on. I’ll probably start job hunting in a week. I dunno, I’d like to be a writer, but obviously so does everyone and you need to pay the bills. So I’ll just wait and see what I can get.”

Follow Christopher on Twitter @chrishall9011