The things you were aiming at, which seemed so straight and true before, suddenly become blurred.You don’t know where you’re going, you’re distracted, and your options seem negative – if you go back to your old job, you’ll be thought a failure; if you try to pursue a career in the media, you’re a wannabe. Was it easy to get back to ordinary business life afterwards?No, to be honest, it wasn’t. When you come out, you’re presented with so many business opportunities that you have never considered before – D’you want to work in TV? D’you want to work in radio? These things bombard you until you lose your focus. So it more or less put an end to my career.When you became a ‘Big Brother’ contestant, you were running an internet company. They wanted me to record some dreadful cover versions, cheesy stuff I was never going to do. I’ve been trying to have a musical career for 20 years! But Big Brother killed it stone dead.

Yes, I had some strange approaches from record companies who basically wanted to ride the reality TV bandwagon. I mean, I’ve been in a band since I was 16, I had a deal with A&M records, we’ve had albums. My initial reaction was wanting to go away and live in New York, to get away from it all.Everyone remembers you playing the guitar incessantly in the ‘Big Brother’ house. Did you get snapped up by a record company?I didn’t really think the TV show would launch my music career into the stratosphere but it surprised me to find it did the complete opposite. Suddenly I was seen as a bit of a joke, as a reality TV star trying to have a musical career. Being recognised everywhere you go, not being able to have a drink without being bothered and asked questions and harassed generally, that, for me, was unusual and hard to deal with.

That was good for me because the whole instant fame did my head in The shock of it was quite intense. He has been involved in various business enterprises, marketing his inventions, and is married.How did you feel in the days following your emergence from the ‘Big Brother’ house?I came out on the same day as Brian [Dowling, the eventual winner] and Helen [Adams] but because I came third, I sort of slipped away fairly unnoticed. We talked to Dean O’Loughlin, one of the stars of Big Brother 2, for ever lodged in the national memory as the handsome, mildly disgusted-looking chap who strummed a guitar and looked down on the less philosophically gifted of his co-prisoners Mr O’Loughlin, 39, is from Halesowen in the West Midlands He left school at 16 and started a band called Lost Cause. The streets will be crammed with thousands of strenuously exuberant, Type-A personalities and zany individualists.

“Producers,” say Endemol, “hope the new system will allow them to see more people, and a wider cross-section of the public, than ever before.”When the lucky 12 are chosen, though, just how lucky will they be? The evidence of several former housemates suggests that the two months of incarceration may not be a time of unalloyed bliss, and its aftermath may have damaging psychological effects. In a break with previous years, when aspiring housemates were selected on the strength of videotaped CVs, the selection board is holding open auditions in Glasgow, Manchester, Newcastle, Cardiff, Birmingham, Belfast and London, beginning next Saturday. Endemol, the company behind the world’s most famous reality TV show, are holding auditions to find the BB Class of 2004. Roll up, roll up! Step this way for the chance to be incarcerated for nine weeks with a gang of sociopathic exhibitionists under the pitiless eyes of 24-hour closed-circuit TV cameras, filming your every furtive move, your filthy habits, your shocking temper and wayward mood swings, and your failure to interest any of the opposite sex in your pasty charms.
Yes, Big Brother is back. The densely populated Far East is considered a source of new flu strains because domestic poultry and pigs are routinely reared and handled by ordinary people.. Vietnam has slaughtered about 14 million chickens and Thailand about 26 million.Scientists have shown that the three major pandemics of human influenza in the 20th century – 1918, 1958 and 1968 – were all the result of avian virus changing its structure and becoming more infectious to people.