[Jane] Nikita Russian.
[Daniel] He had this look about him.
[Lucie] He was someone that you would notice
and, like, instantly respect.
[Daniel] This was an opportunity to start a new life.
[Lucie] I'd given up a really good job.
I'd walked away from my home, my boyfriend.
[Jane] They were so excited I thought that,
"This show is gonna change my life forever."
[Tim] I'm off for a year, I'm gonna make £100,000.
I'll see ya then.
[Harry Hill] Thirty grown men and women gave up their jobs and homes for a year
to be in a reality TV show that doesn't exist.
Why you do that?
[audience laughter]
[thunder breaks]
[John] It was all smoke and mirrors.
Ah!
[Tim] It wasn't real.
[Jane] What do you mean it's not real?
[John] No Channel 4 commission. The guy works in a bookshop.
None of it existed.
We had real strong, angry feelings towards Nik Russian.
How could you do this? What were you thinking?
[Jane] I remember John, he was saying, "I'm gonna go in there.
I'm gonna kill that Nik. I'm gonna kill him."
[John] This is a complete clusterfuck.
What the fuck to do.
He'd made thirty people give up everything,
move to London, thinking they're gonna take part in a massive TV show
and then crashed their lives into a ditch.
[Nik] Nobody has heard my side of this.
People seem to be cooking up that I did this for malicious motives.
I was trying to produce a TV show.
People sign up to eat kangaroo anuses in the jungle,
but going off on a mission to try and make money,
to me, it didn't seem like such a massive thing.
I thought people had signed up for absolutely anything.
But it hasn't really worked the way I was hoping it would work.
I don't think Nik Russian realises quite how close
some of us came to...
stomping on his head.
[Lucie] Has he just left a pile of clothes?
[Maria] Well, we don't know, we can't really tell what's in it.
[overlapping chatter]
Do you think... Is it stuff he can live without?
After Nik had slept in Tim's flat, he made a quick sharp exit.
[Tim] This is the guy's bag. Nikita Russian.
[Jane] When he'd gone,
that's when everyone was like, "Right, what we gonna do?"
"What are we gonna do about this?"
[Tim] Just underneath here...
[Maria] To expose Nik and what we've been caught into,
we should contact papers and stuff like that.
Absolutely. I totally agree.
-[woman 1] Yeah. -[woman 2] Yeah.
[John] There was a bit of a plan that was hatched
to not get some payback, but, er...
actually no, probably get some payback.
We're just trying to get something in the papers or on TV, or whatever.
I'll get some more production companies from contacts,
you've got the television company ones there.
Yeah, I've got the television, I've got BBC local radio.
[Tim] My name's Tim Eagle.
I'm a contestant on a reality TV show that's gone wrong.
You wanna be on the telly, you wanna make telly,
I'm gonna put you on a fucking telly, mate, see what you think about that.
Alright? Here we go.
[Tim] He's called Nikita Russian.
It's Nikita Russian Productions.
I had a friend who knew about how to break news stories, you know.
So I contacted him and he gave me the contact at London Tonight.
[London Tonight theme tune plays]
Tonight: pay up or get out.
MPs demand the royals living at your expense foot the bill
or leave the luxury of Kensington Palace.
[London Tonight theme tune plays]
We've got... I mean, we've got...
We've got the contracts and things like that.
We've got all the stuff that we signed.
Yeah.
Brilliant. Alright, thank you.
Cheers, bye.
Yeah, they're gonna show up at 9.30 tomorrow morning.
[cheers]
Fuck, we gotta get up really early.
[Jane] It was just so exciting.
Oh, my God!
They're actually coming!
[cheers]
We're gonna be on London Tonight news.
The whole world is going to see us.
I wonder if it really is gonna now turn into something.
It's the power of dreaming, isn't it?
It became a mission to, er,
hoist him by his own petard.
We need to get those tapes back
off the guy who's editing.
We need to get them back right now.
I went off on the bus with John at one point to meet the editor.
He has this box of tapes.
We went to see the editor.
We re-claimed our footage so we can show it to London Tonight and the papers.
The footage of us turning up in the park.
So, we've done that
and we're on the way back now.
And I have just texted our team
because Nik is back at the place waiting for us.
And that's why this just beeped.
[Daniel] Someone said, "Nik's here."
[laughter]
[Nick] No, you still look like you're getting up now.
[Daniel] He came back into that environment.
How could he? I would never have thought anyone would be that stupid or brave.
[Nik] There wasn't somewhere else for me to go to.
I'd given up my... home.
I was as marooned and homeless as the other people there.
[Jane] Nik came back.
I mean, that's just, like... crazy.
So he did us a favour.
We were able to corner him.
[Tim] We didn't tell Nik that the TV were coming.
So then it all become about,
Mission: Keep Nikita Russian in the Flat.
I don't know if you've ever been held captive by a group of people.
But, er, I wouldn't recommend it as an experience.
It was frightening.
Mentally, I was falling apart a little bit.
Basically.
I was in a very bad way.
[Rosy] Lucie, are you going to be long?
Okay, because, erm, they wanna start filming.
[Jane] I remember him sitting on the carpet.
I remember somebody making him a brew.
And then we all sort of surrounded him, and he was sat, actually, there.
[indistinct chatter]
I literally had three days in which to organise my life.
Pack my entire life into my suitcase, cancel everything.
I was actually a dancer for the Commonwealth Games.
I got chosen, I got picked, I went for the audition.
[Nick] It's not like you're just fucking with people's lives,
you're fucking with their dreams, people's dreams.
That's, like, sacred that you're fucking with.
[Maria] That's, like, satanic to do something like that.
I intended to start
this part of my career
and start my life properly doing this as well...
[woman] We don't want to hear about you.
[Maria] "This was my dream too." I don't give a damn.
I don't care if this was your dream,
because right about now, it's not about you,
it's about 30 other people.
[Lucie] He was saying things like, "This is my dream."
I didn't really choose to be in your dream.
I wanted to be in my dream.
Without any...
cameramen, or you know, the cameramen that you need,
and all the equipment
and everything, everything, you do not have a show.
And what we feel is you've got a bunch of...
people that feel like absolute mugs,
and I don't quite know really...
[interviewer] Did it feel a bit like you were getting revenge?
Sounds awful, getting revenge.
But it probably did.
[laughter]
Yeah.
[Maria] The media don't even know about it.
I don't believe that you ever had negotiations with Channel 4.
I don't believe that there's any other cable channel interested.
[Lucie] You don't give us any information. You don't answer any of our questions.
And you don't look at us.
[Maria] No eye contact at all.
[Lucie] Your body language is so negative.
You either don't know or you're lying to us.
I'm sorry if my body language is negative, it's because I'm shit scared, frankly.
[Maria] Everybody who I've spoken to about it
has said to me, "This guy was gonna make you all earn the money
and he was gonna run off with it."
I'm sorry, that's just not true.
The stress that I was under by this point was...
I vaguely remember there being, like, a rising high-pitched mosquito sound
going on in the back of my... consciousness.
The feeling of a loss of blood from me.
I guess in between the fear of what the hell was going on here,
there was...
on my mind, the feeling that...
this could surely be better used
if we focused it on the actual project rather than...
division.
I thought these were people who had the urgency and energy
to burst out and get things done.
I was trying to take the reality format and produce a TV show.
So that everyone could benefit.
[crowds cheering]
At that time, reality TV had a sense of barely controlled anarchy.
I wonder whether you remember a show called The Word.
They had a section in there called, "I Would Do Anything to Get on TV."
I'd do anything to get on TV.
[Nik] People were being jubilant about the fact that
that had earned them some airtime.
And I would think, you know,
why isn't there something a bit more constructive
that we could all be doing with that energy.
-[rip] -Jesus!
[audience cheer and jeer]
[Nik] What about if that energy was to be focused in a particular way?
I left home aged 16.
I had no money.
I was working in... jobs that didn't pay very much.
So I wanted to make something where you could come away from the project
with a nest egg, a business.
The career step, where everybody was equal,
and it did what each person wanted for that person.
But things clearly were not going as they were supposed to.
In fact, it was all about to get a lot worse.
[doorbell rings]
[Rosy chuckles] Fantastic.
Sit on the bed, alright?
We hadn't told him that London Tonight, the news crew were gonna be coming round.
And he got a bit of a shock when they did.
What's happened here, mate?
I've fucked up big time with a reality TV project
that was supposed to
get a whole load of people to achieve their dreams.
And, erm...
After a string of disasters and
horrendous planning and mistakes on my part
that should never have happened, it's all gone very, very wrong.
He seemed to be really at breaking point.
I think at that point, when the news crew came around.
But again, I was watching him, thinking...
Are you at breaking point or are you really enjoying this?
[man] What's their reception to you been like?
It can't be great sleeping in the same room.
Is it the same flat as 10 of your failed contestants?
No, I've just been called satanic.
[man] What are you gonna do next?
What are you gonna do to help this lot out?
The only way I can help now is we're trying to put together a pilot
for a very scaled-down version of the show
which we want to get in front of
the same companies and other companies
who we were talking to before.
Perhaps we can salvage something out of this.
I remember having the barrel of the camera...
pointing at me in much the way this camera is pointing at me right now.
Did I know I was being shamed at that moment? Yeah, absolutely.
That was quite clearly the intention.
But they obviously regarded it as something they needed to do.
I would have said, "If you're gonna get a local news crew involved,
try and use it to stoke the project back up."
"And why turn on me?"
[man 1] So, what happens now?
Are you sleeping here as well?
I slept here last night.
After tonight, I don't know where I'm going to be sleeping.
[man 1] Ok, mate, that'll do, nice one.
Thank you very much, Nikita.
[man 2] Any chance a few of you could get back into your sleeping bags?
[man 1] Means that you kind of create a scene of crowded chaos.
[John] They asked us to get into sleeping bags
and try to look a bit more sort of... homeless.
So we kind of played along with that and hammed it up.
[Jane] I mean, before I came here, I've got two agents,
I'm an actress, I'm also a singer,
and the fact that it could be a stepping stone to help my career,
I chose this.
But I am so regretting choosing this.
I just can't believe it.
[Tim] Well, I was really relishing this, 'cause I could see this kind of...
layering of this mad story going on in my front room.
As the reality TV show contestants being filmed, and they're being filmed,
and this is being filmed, and everybody's being filmed.
You know.
I think it was good telly, you know.
The greatest show never made
is now being made.
[man] I think you probably need to get out of that sleeping bag now.
[laughter]
[Jane] We did, like, erm...
a shot where...
we all had to look sort of really sad,
and hold up our passports,
to show that Nik Russian was the baddie.
He was a bad boy.
[laughter]
I seem to remember some shaking of hands some "thank you very muches"
and off they went.
Not shaking my hand, by the way,
I should say shaking other people's hands, like this was a deal that had been done.
"We got what we needed, thank you for providing that."
That kind of thing. And off they went.
There was this genuine sense of achievement.
I was satisfied with...
what we'd done to Nik.
With how we got our... own back on him.
He does look very... Yeah, he looks defeated.
It was probably something that he wanted to do in his career.
After this, could you hire this man? Probably not.
So maybe his dream has gone too.
[crash]
Oh, my...
[Nik] I keep making stuff.
I've noticed that about myself.
I know when I was a kid, I'd play around making videos with my mate Mike.
During the break, there has been some interesting developments.
[Nik] I think we were united by comedy.
-[splash] -Ah!
[Nik] Just the fun of achieving kind of a creative project,
putting that together. Imagining something, making it real.
[laughing] We in the studio are sealed off from this,
but our reporter, Orville Dempson, is in the middle of it.
Here's his report.
[Nik] It was bland middle-class suburbia.
But my personal life was just a very, very unhappy time.
What was happening for me was misery.
I can't really go into detail about what happened.
But by the time I was 15,
it culminated in me ending up in a very deep, dark place.
I was just dysfunctional, extraordinarily dysfunctional.
My imagination was the only place I could go to.
Books were a holiday.
They were somewhere that I could escape to.
I started writing.
I wrote copiously.
Stories about spaceships and aliens and all that kind of malarkey.
It fired up my imagination and made me see what was possible in life
and also in terms of constructing alternative narratives.
That's what really excited me.
If it didn't work, fine, start a new story,
you can create a whole new platform to spring off from.
I came out of childhood with a massive identity crisis.
Without any sense of a "me" that was okay.
And I had such a self-hate that I couldn't bear to hear my own name.
So I had to change it.
I changed my name a few different times.
And I think that's what was going on,
was I was trying out a bunch of different potential identities.
I was sort of seeing what might make some sort of a sense.
And I came out of it with...
a very silly name.
[muffled laughter]
Nikita Russian.
That's the one.
It was about establishing an identity of my own.
I was determined to get hold of life somewhere along the line.
-And who's the prat now? Nik. -[Maria] Exactly, yeah.
[Tim] Nik left after he'd been filmed.
I had to go down and let him out the door.
Before he left, he said to Tim, er...
"Can I take that footage with me to put into the pilot?"
He's enjoying!
[Tim] Yeah, I mean it makes a much better documentary for him, doesn't it?
[interviewer] Did you really think you could still make a show?
Yep.
Yeah.
I really felt like this was possible.
So now I'm at large on my own.
On the streets of London.
I've gotta try and figure out what to do next.
So I spoke to a friend who'd been involved from its inception.
We were best mates.
I hadn't spoken to him since I backed away so I didn't know any of this was going on.
So I go and meet him in Waterloo
and the first thing I noticed, he was shaking.
He stood me a pint in a pub.
While we were there, London Tonight came on.
[London Tonight theme tune plays]
Turning now to showbiz and the unglamorous side of reality TV.
The meteoric rise of programmes like Big Brother and Survivor has led to many
seeing these game shows and others like them
as a passport to fame and fortune.
[male reporter] Some people will do anything to get on the telly,
this lot did.
They gave up their homes, jobs, cut all ties,
but a reality TV show where they had to start from nothing and prosper...
This is better than Big Brother.
[male reporter] ...they're sleeping on a floor in Dalston.
Now, if you think they're miserable, just take a look at this guy.
I know I'm a figure of hate now, and I think rightly so.
Got my first taste of what it was like to have all the people in the pub
look from the screen to me and back to the screen,
and start pointing fingers and, er,
that was rather uncomfortable.
[Michael] To be on the news, even the local news, is pretty big.
Nik's at the centre of this, er, absolute chaos that he's created,
and there's people round him,
and they're shouting at him.
And I... I was annoyed, I was annoyed with him because this is big
and also, you couldn't help feeling a bit sorry for him.
There was an element of this which was about
pushing through and getting this thing to happen.
One of the things I'd been told when I was a kid,
one of the things I'd had drummed into me,
was that it wasn't good enough to start something and not finish it.
I wanted to try and show that I could manage to do this.
Nik asked me to help him sell his idea to media companies.
I just couldn't believe it.
What, now? Now you want to do this?
Could we not have done that six months ago before this car crash?
He'd made 30 people give up everything,
move to London thinking they're gonna take part in a massive TV show
and then crashed their lives into a ditch.
I screamed, "I want nothing to do with this!"
I was so angry.
That was actually...
That was my last ever conversation I've had with him for 20 years.
Still, yeah, not spoken to him since.
He agreed that he was gonna go his own way and keep out of it.
That's the last time I ever saw him.
My best friend since childhood.
Did I feel terrible?
I'll say.
And...
And now I was homeless too.
[man] This London Tonight thing gets better with every viewing.
[woman] Did you see it?
And doesn't he just.
Oh, guys, my landlady says he looks like a real idiot.
Did you see the state of him?
It just felt like you won the lottery, yeah.
It was our way of, like, getting something back.
And the fact we were on TV, wow. [laughs]
That was a bonus.
Never in a million years did I expect that to happen.
Yeah.
[Jane] We're going to leave you now.
Thank you.
-[Nick] Come on. -[Rosy] Oh, yeah.
[Nick] It's your turn now.
[Tim] We'd done what we could. We'd carried on as best we can.
But in the end,
it was just a little game we'd played for a few days.
I'm still angry.
[woman] Oh, yeah.
[Rosy] Come on, come on.
Bye-bye!
Goodbye, the world of reality TV.
Thank God.
[indistinct chattering]
[Tim] That was the point at which I turned my camera off.
Of course, you know.
That moment, when I walked back up into this empty flat,
after them all being here for that week...
It was like, pfft.
I've not escaped.
It was my dream come true, I thought.
I thought I was gonna be a presenter on TV.
And so I'm suffering a bit from embarrassment as well.
But I seriously thought for quite a while that had come true,
and that I was a very lucky girl and it was actually happening to me.
But I'm not so sure anymore.
I did really want to be a presenter.
I was, you know, happy when I was doing it.
So the damage that had been done there was really huge.
I don't think Nik Russian realises quite how close
some of us came to...
stomping on his head.
Because that's better than he deserves.
I think this might have been a bit more instrumental
in where I've ended up than I thought.
To take a real big chance on something, that was probably it.
I think it made me more risk averse.
Our time in the flat was very much a time of its own.
So, even though I had everybody's phone numbers,
I didn't phone any of them.
And none of them phoned me.
I kind of wish I had.
They were just good people
who I wouldn't mind having had as proper friends in my life.
-Ahh. -Welcome back.
-How are you? -Yeah, I'm good. I'm good.
-Tim. Wow! -How are you?
Hello.
-Hello, hello, hello. -Alright!
[laughter]
[together] Hello!
[indistinct]
-[gasps] -Hello.
Rosy!
[laughter]
Oh, my gosh!
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
And I only... I was lucky to get out of this really.
-Hello. -Argh!
-[laughter] -Of course, right.
Yes, hello.
[Daniel] Oh, my God!
How are you doing?
Oh, Daniel.
Hey!
[laughter]
When I came in here, I just immediately felt like
-I was back there. -Yeah.
And I said somebody used to sit on the toilet like this
and then somebody would sit on the edge of the bath,
and I'd be, like, watching everybody for, like, makeup tips,
'cause everyone looked really glamorous, and, you know.
After I left London,
you know, it was as if like my dream had been shattered.
[Rosy] Yeah.
I just didn't want to go back
because my feelings weren't great,
because afterwards, I did go through a real low period.
-[Rosy] That's a shame. -[Jane] Yeah.
And, so I wanted it, I didn't want to think about it.
[Lucie] I just felt embarrassed to go home.
My mum gave me a letter.
And I remember I didn't read it 'till
when it was kind of all over.
"Don't call me silly for worrying about you.
I am your mother.
I'm very proud of you for what you are doing.
A lot of women would be too afraid to go into the unknown.
Even if, really, they would love the opportunity.
Well, you have the opportunity.
Love from Mum."
And I just wanted to die inside.
I just felt...
I felt stupid right then.
Just at that point.
This isn't how it was supposed to be.
You know?
['00s Nokia ringtone plays]
It was like if I went home, that's it.
You're closing the door, it's finished.
[ringtone continues]
So I stayed here for about, I think another four months.
I needed my independence
and to show my dad that I can live my own life.
And me and Daniel, we went on some amazing nights out.
♪ Sexy ♪
♪ Everything about you is so sexy ♪
[Jane] One of the songs that we used to like dancing to was
Liberty X "Just a Little".
And I knew all the steps
and the dance routine and everything, you know.
♪ Oh, yeah ♪
[Jane] But I got recognised from the London Tonight news.
People just came over, "Oh, my God, it's them!"
You know, and they were just like coming running at us in, you know, in bars
and offering to buy us drinks and everything.
Never knew what it felt like to be sort of mini-famous,
but we were.
♪ Hot just a little ♪
"Were you on TV?" And I'd go, "I was on TV, yes."
Yeah. "What you doin' here?" You know.
"What's happening now?"
I'd say, "Oh, nothing at the moment."
[laughter]
-John. -Lucie.
-Hello. -Hello.
Amazing to meet you! [laughter]
[Lucie] Again.
-[Lucie] How are you? -[John] I am...
Older, probably not much wiser.
[Jane] Hi, John!
[laughter]
-Hey, Jane. -Hiya.
[John] How are you?
And Rosy.
John, come on!
Oh, wow. Wow. Hey.
Oh, my gosh! It's Daniel!
Hello!
What you all doing in my flat then, eh? Come on.
[squeals]
[Tim] Welcome back, guys!
Put the kettle on.
[Tim] I will put the kettle on.
You know where you're all sleeping, don't you?
To be sitting here with you guys now, to me, seems really natural.
[all] Yeah.
[Jane] Do you remember Nik Russian being in here with us?
[Tim] Yeah, yeah.
I would love to meet him.
I don't wanna meet him. I'm curious, yeah. No, not at all.
I can't think I would actually...
believe much that he told me now, if I met him.
Okay.
[interviewer] What did Nik Russian actually do wrong?
He was, er, I think...
I think the only thing he... Yeah, he didn't tell the truth.
[Tim] It was his kind of psychological thing.
He kind of played us, didn't tell the full story.
[Lucie] He didn't tell... Yeah.
[interviewer] What do you think you actually did wrong?
So you're after a list of liabilities, is there a list of culpabilities?
Maybe by withholding what the nature of the show was,
I'd allowed them to fill it in with what they wanted it to be.
Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, the advert was absolutely inappropriate.
It was really just shorthand for, "This is the outcome."
It wasn't meant to imply that there was a prize fund there.
Yeah, it was definitely a misjudgement.
[Lucie] There were some untruths
that had a lot to do with me making my mind up
whether to be involved with this or not.
There were some... there were some lies in there, you know.
What did he lie about?
-That it was commissioned to Channel 4. -[Jane] That's right.
Yep.
I don't know where the idea of it
having been past tense "commissioned" came from.
I might have said to somebody that we were gonna talk to Channel 4.
The idea was that this was going to be started and then sold.
Why not tell us to begin with?
-I agree. I agree with you. -Yeah.
Perhaps because he knew that it was gonna fall apart.
Because like that David Wilder, you know he dropped out.
-[Rosy] Who's David Wilder? -[Tim] He was his director guy.
He was part of what made me believe that it was for real.
[David] When I left, I thought, "Oh, well, he'll just get someone else."
I think the contestants
were, in some cases, expecting something great to happen.
So they must have been very disappointed.
God bless them, you know.
[interviewer] Did you consider not going ahead with the project
when the director pulled out?
Yeah, of course.
I was getting messages in from...
various people involved with it,
saying "I've handed back the keys to my flat now,
we're all ready to go, I've got my bags packed,
I'm standing by the front door."
This kind of thing.
And I have a choice to make at this point, do I try to make it work without him?
Or do I... put a stop to everything?
I just remember having to make a choice.
What he did, he took a chance.
And we allowed him to take that chance.
I know we were young,
but we were adults,
and we... we... The decisions you make are on you.
We were so fixated on achieving that one thing,
whatever it was,
that we were willing to forget about all the other tell-tale signs.
That's what we wanted, we went for it.
-We must be honest with ourselves. -[Tim] No, I agree.
I recognise my culpability.
-On reflection, I fooled myself there. -[Rosy] Yeah.
[Tim] Because that's what I wanted to believe.
[Lucie] Yeah, but I hope that...
Yeah, I hope that, you know, he learned from it as well.
You know, you don't get a group of people and...
dupe them into giving up their careers and relationships.
That's quite a serious thing to do.
[Rosy] I've always wondered...
how he's doing as well,
because, you know,
the subsequent vilification of him,
you know, in the media afterwards, must have had some effect.
[interviewer] Can you tell me a little bit about
how the months following the launch of the project played out for you?
[Nik] As a result of what happened, my life was completely transformed.
I was on the street for some weeks, and homeless.
There were lots of unfavourable articles about me.
I was being recognised everywhere.
I would be routinely sitting on a bus
and there would be people two seats behind discussing loudly
how I'd done this or done that, the most outrageous fictions.
There's a movie where as the, em,
as the dream that somebody's in starts to break down
all the people in the streetscape around them begin to look at them.
It didn't feel too different from that, really.
That's extremely unnerving.
I found myself slipping more and more into drink.
I was a, an alcoholic.
So I was completely isolated and...
I was in a terrible, terrible state, for a long time.
Probably ten years.
Everything from my childhood was all flooding back, and I...
I wanted my life to end.
And...
But the most crushing thing was that I'd done wrong by these people,
and that's... that's the thing that really just destroyed me,
was the knowledge that I had done terrible harm to these people.
[Jane] Believe it or not, I would thank him.
Because he turned my life around and changed it for the better.
If I hadn't had been in this flat with you guys,
my life as it is now might never have happened.
So when I went back to Manchester,
I did feel deflated.
So I just lived off
spicy chicken wings.
You know, they were like comforts for me.
My dad had seen the London Tonight news,
and he just said, "Oh, don't worry," and gave me a massive hug
and said, "I love you so much, I'm so proud of you."
And that was so nice to hear that from my dad.
But then I had to think, "What am I going to do?"
And so I joined an Extra Agency.
I mean, I was nervous to begin with, like,
again being around, like, on set and cameras and everything,
but bit by bit the confidence grew.
I did lots of different TV dramas.
I met so many famous people.
[interviewer] Sounds like you were living a dream.
[Jane] Yeah, I was.
Wow. [laughter]
And that was in 2003, so that's a year later.
So I do have... a lot to thank Nik Russian for, in a way.
So, thank you, Nik. If you're out there listening.
Changed my life.
Well, that's remarkable, isn't it?
Erm...
No matter what he did, talent like that,
he was very intelligent, very creative.
He did a stupid thing, we allowed him to do a stupid thing.
We were all culpable, we were all involved.
Hey, I wish him all the best.
I'd like to know what he's done with his life.
I hope he's done something great.
Yeah, I agree. I hope that he's tried again.
I hope that it didn't completely dampen his spirit.
I'm glad to hear them talking like that.
It's a really amazing thing to see.
I'm really glad to have seen it.
I'd never meant to do anybody any harm, quite the opposite,
I'd been trying to make something good happen.
I can't change, of course, what happened. I can take...
And I do take responsibility for everything I've done at every point.
And maybe... maybe putting this stuff into the open,
maybe that's... maybe that's good for someone.
My life now is stable.
I think maybe I'm stable.
I've rather willingly changed my name to the name I have now.
And my name is N. Quentin Woolf, Nik Quentin Woolf.
Erm...
I wrote a book called The Death of the Poet.
And it was all about two characters
who are suffering from trauma.
All he really wanted to be was a writer,
and he was good at that, and I think it's nice that that's kind of,
you know, that's the world he's entered.
The biggest loser in this was Nik.
He's had to live his life on the down-low, right?
And that's not what he wanted for himself, it's not what I wanted for him.
Nobody wanted that for him.
[interviewer] What you up to now?
Well, I've had, erm, a few setbacks, erm...
I lost my dad.
And, erm...
When he was unwell,
I just had to be there for him.
The whole time.
So... I had to put my life on hold.
And the acting on hold.
Well, this is me. In a town called Bury.
And I have so many happy memories of being here with my dad.
The fact that my dad's gone, maybe it's like inner strength.
It's made me even stronger.
I'm still determined not to give up on my dream to be an actress.
I'd like to inspire people
to, like, have fun as well.
[laughter]
And to be a little bit crazy.
Yeah.
Now it's, erm, I was thinking earlier on.
A little idea, that I could go if I can remember it.
[guitar string tuning]
♪ Welcome to the greatest show never made ♪
♪ It's up to you ♪
♪ To make it happen ♪
♪ Welcome to the greatest show never made ♪
♪ It's up to you ♪
♪ To fake it 'till you make it ♪
I sort of thought I was gonna to be a teacher.
But now I'm a...
I'm a sell-out in the city.
I became a Management Consultant.
[interviewer] Are you happy?
Yeah, I am happy.
Yeah.
[song continues]
[Daniel] I work in finance.
And I'm very... comfortable with my lifestyle.
I'm very... I don't know if I can say happy,
I don't know if adults can really be happy.
I'm very content. I'm very content.
I want my daughter to have weird experiences
and to learn from them and to have fun,
and to look back when she's an old woman
and think, "I've lived life to the fullest,"
and laugh at some of the mistakes that she's made.
After 11 years of working in the corporate world,
again, I was itching for another adventure.
And so I decided to pack my bags,
and my partner and I, we have this farm in Spain,
producing really good quality olive oil.
Yeah, so another adventure, and now we've added 500 bees!
So we'll do honey as well. [laughter]
Who knows what next?
[interviewer] What happened to your dream of being a presenter?
I did do a little bit of presenting after this.
Erm...
You know what? I think...
Bigger dreams overtook it.
And became more important.
-Boo! -[laughter]
I'm a mum, and it feels...
You know, I'm feeling emotional by saying that!
Because that's what I really wanted.
We're allowed to have dreams and we can have as many as we want.
Right?
[laughter]
I'm married to a wonderful human being.
I've got two excellent children
who are gonna go on to be amazing
in their special unique ways.
And it's an authentic, well-built, real life.
[Tim] This experience made me change who I was.
And for the better.
I was able to leave those thoughts of fame behind
and just be happy with what I've got.
I've got my home and I've got my wife and I've got my child
and I've got all those things that I ever wanted.
Apart from the fame and the worldwide success.
But, you know, that's coming.
♪ Welcome to the greatest show never made ♪
♪ It's up to you to make it happen ♪
It is quite possible that Nik could be involved in this show
in some capacity, at a very senior level, pulling the strings.
I would not be surprised if...
-I never thought of that. -I see what you mean.
Yep.
[gasps]
This could be a Nik Russian Production.
-[Lucie] That's brilliant. -[Daniel] He got me twice, Jesus!
[laughter]
♪ Maybe we'll surprise you all ♪
♪ And make that show after all ♪
-[applause] -[David] You're too kind.
You're too kind.