CELEBRITY SCOOP: 'The Family'

Great TV is often a difficult thing to come by, great reality TV is even tougher , yet 2009 saw Channel Four hit the bulls eye with the latest edition of ‘The Family’. The show had been done before and followed the traditional reality TV path of cameras placed around a house recording every movement of each member of the family; with the promise that we the viewers would be shown the best bits and the best bits alone.

It’s easy to assume that shows such as these will be immediately successful; after all, they completely appeal to the human nature of curiosity, deep down we all desire to know what the other persons lives are like but there was more to this show, we were provided with so much more than the opportunity of being the nosy neighbour peering through the curtains-it was the beauty of the family themselves that made the entire series TV gold and personally left me asking; “Why were there only eight episodes?!”

Thank you for taking the time to talk to us. How has life been after the show has aired? Have you been able to have normal lives?

Sonny - Yeah I think our life is quite normal, it hasn’t really changed much except for occasionally when we attend certain events, we’ve noticed that we can’t really attend unless we’re invited as guests; purely because we get recognised and crowds build up and there’s the safety issue; we wouldn’t know how to control the crowds and of course we wouldn’t want to offend anyone

Shay - There is a change in a sense that people want to see us

Sonny - But when I go to work, I go to work regularly and do my shifts and so does Shay

Did it feel strange to know that people all over the country would be watching you?

Shay - We never thought about it like that

Sonny -  I didn’t find it strange at all

Shay - Forget the show for a second, how many documentaries do you watch? That’s what it was for us-when we started we thought maybe a few thousand people may watch it; in our minds we genuinely didn’t think that millions of people would watch it-it was mind blowing to think that so many people would want to watch us

Sonny - when we did it, we did it on the basis of the first series of ‘The Family’ and we just thought we’ll act normal-we never thought it would be this big

Did you get a chance to pick and choose what would be shown within the episodes

Shay - No, we always knew the directors would choose the bits that they wanted and we kind of approached it in a; we don’t really want to know, way. I mean if you think about it they had over three months of footage and I honestly don’t think any of us would have had the time and the strength to go through all of it-we were quite happy for them to decide what they wanted.

You can catch the full, in-depth interview with Sonny and Shay in the Summer Issue of ‘Don’t Delay...’