Just a few days in and already Gogglebox star Scarlett Moffatt is already the nation’s favourite on I’m A Celeb.
Her canny mix of razor-sharp one-liners and her wry observations have had both her camp mates and viewers fall hook, line and sinker in love with her and the bookies make her favourite to become Queen of The Jungle in a couple of weeks of time.
But Scarlett wasn’t always the confident young girl she appears to be on our screens.
Oh no, back when she was at school, the Geordie lass was terrorised by bullies who took great pleasure in poking fun at her “monobrow, and teeth that you could chew an apple through a letterbox”.
“I was really ugly, I was really weird and I believed in aliens,” Scarlett has revealed. “Even as a kid when I was 11 or 12, I wasn’t like the other kids in the school – I still wore my hair in pigtails. No wonder I got picked on.”
Although being called all sorts of names gave her little opportunity to smile, there was another reason why she didn’t flash her gnashers with glee – she’d smashed her teeth in an accident
“I was on my bike when I was 11 and a car hit me. The nerves had gone, so I had black teeth at the front.”
But it was this incident and a change of school at 14 that helped Scarlett become the funny lass we all know and love today, as she started to develop a super-sharp self-deprecating humour that would eventually make her the stand out star of Gogglebox.
“I knew I had to make friends,” she recalled. “Once I moved school and puberty hit over the six-weeks holiday, all of a sudden I got boobs, my mam let me wax my eyebrows and I went and got my hair done. I just had this newfound confidence.”
And it was then that she found the strength to hit back at those kids at school who had tried to make her lfie a misery.
“Being bullied made me realise that people will like you or not like you anyway, so you might as well be yourself and say exactly what you think.”
Scarlett has also revealed that her amazing weight loss was inspired when she topped the scales at 11st and found herself in danger of developing diabetes.
“I have been tested for diabetes because my BMI puts me in the danger one. It was a real scare and I know I need to sort myself out and lose weight.”
And as she got bigger she found herself once again falling foul of bullies – this time on line.
“I’d be lying if I said that it doesn’t hurt sometimes. People are brutal,” she said.
“They forget that people on telly are actually real people. It upsets my mum and dad.”
Now 3st 4lb lighter, she has slimmed down from a size 18 to an eight and admits sometimes she doesn’t recognise her old self on the telly.
“When I come home drunk and put the telly on, I feel like, ‘Who is she?’” she confided in the Mirror.
“When I take off my clothes to get in the bath, I can look at myself in the mirror. I don’t have to jump straight in.”