EXCLUSIVE: Caroline Monk, who starred in the 2025 Big Brother series, has opened up about her past relationship with broadcaster Matthew Wright, saying ‘I’m glad it was over’ and revealing what really happened in the house
Caroline Monk — the unmistakably candid Big Brother housemate — has finally chosen to lift the lid on one of the most enduring questions about her past: what life was really like behind closed doors with broadcaster Matthew Wright.
Long before she was causing chaos, laughter and the occasional controversy inside the 2025 Big Brother house, which saw 61 year old Richard take the crown, Caroline was known among certain corners of the entertainment world as the no-nonsense personality who once had a long, complicated romance with Wright, the former host of Channel 5’s weekday current-affairs show The Wright Stuff.
Their relationship existed well before Caroline found herself catapulted back into public consciousness through the reality show, forming a significant chapter in her life that she rarely revisited — until now.
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And when she does, she does so with the same blunt, doorway-wide honesty that defined her time on national television.
“He looked after me the whole time I had cancer,” she explains, with a calmness that suggests she has long made peace with the tenderness and the turmoil of that era. “He looked after me. But I think when I got better, I turned into my mad, crazy self again — and he couldn’t handle me.”
She doesn’t speak with bitterness, nor does she romanticise the past, she says: “I haven’t got a bad word to say about him apart from… you know… I’m glad it was over. It just wasn’t right. He’s moody, I’m moody — it was just normal. And it was about twenty years ago, so I can’t believe it’s been that long.”
Caroline says she never heard from him again after they broke up: “No, I’ve never heard from him. We’ve never spoken. He’s one of millions, you know.”
It’s only after discussing Matthew that Caroline feels ready to revisit the intense, surreal reality of the Big Brother house — the environment that transformed her from a relatively private figure into one of the most polarising personalities of the series, and one whose eviction opened the floodgates for conversations she says viewers never got to see.
Caroline, who entered the house as one of the oldest contestants in the rebooted series, says that the generation gap coloured almost every experience she had inside those walls, creating a tension between her instinct to cause mischief and the cast’s collective reluctance to express an opinion.
“I was about 35 years older than most of them,” she says. “They didn’t know anything before this year. I couldn’t talk about music, I couldn’t talk about my life – they didn’t know who I was talking about. It was fun, different, and hell.”
Her often-fiery dynamic with eventual winner Richard became one of the season’s defining storylines, but Caroline insists the reality was more playful — and mutual — than viewers were shown.
“At the beginning none of the kids wanted to know him, so I tried really hard to be his friend,” she says. “But he didn’t like me. He just didn’t. And once he started being sarky, I was sarky back. It became a game. He loved every minute of it. As soon as I stopped insulting him, he didn’t know what to do. ‘Insult me! Insult me!’ he’d say.”
She shakes her head at the memory of one of the show’s most controversial labels. “I got called a bully, but Big Brother never said one word to me. If they’d told me once, I would’ve died. It was banter. They didn’t show him being horrible to me.”
And despite her fiery moments, Caroline insists she was far more involved and far more nurturing in the house than the edit suggested. She claims she was the one inventing games, keeping spirits up, and comforting people in the early hours of the morning when the cameras weren’t focused on her.
“I’d like people to have seen me talking to everyone, actually holding them when they were crying,” she says. “But it is what it is.”
The Caroline who emerges outside the house appears surprisingly philosophical. She talks about learning to stop caring what people think, after years of people-pleasing on the outside. She talks about the liberation of letting go. And she even jokes that the cameras didn’t bother her in the slightest. “I forgot all about them,” she laughs. “Otherwise I’d have looked a lot better. The showers were awful — tiny trickles! My hair went green! Thank God for my hats.”
Asked who she wanted to win before Richard ultimately claimed the title, Caroline says she would have thrown her support behind Cameron. “Emily’s lovely but Cameron… he was doing it for a beautiful reason,” she says. “Richard’s got loads of money already!”
