Faria Alam

Faria alam, 40: The Bangladeshi secretary, now 40, appeared on Celebrity Big Brother earlier this year, but was quickly turfed out by viewers. She came to prominence when she was working as a secretary at the Football Association and tried to make much of basically a one-night fling with the now departed England football coach, Sven-Goran Eriksson. Although Faria has always looked attractive in photographs and on television, her conversation on TV proved a little limited. She won no friends by suggesting that on reality shows, the dice was loaded against non-Whites: “Do you think they’ll ever let a Black or Asian girl or guy win this thing? Are you out of your tree? Think about it, darling. Never. Remember that. This country? Oh, please! Don’t even get me going on that. They would never, they’d be up in f***ing arms.” Faria has not been able to make a career from her 15 minutes of fame, although she was invited to a dinner hosted by Eastern Eye newspaper as a “celebrity”.

Saira Khan, 34: She was runner up on The Apprentice, which is presented by Sir Alan Sugar, the tough boss of the Amstrad electronics group (the original version is presented by Donald Trump in the United States). Sugar was so impressed by Saira that he offered her a job (normally only the winner gets that). She has not taken up his offer but Saira, who has subsequently played up her Muslim credentials, has been used by the media as an articulate woman willing to speak out against extremists among her co-religionists. Born into a working class Kashmiri family, she did Humanities at Brighton Polytechnic and an MA in Environmental Planning at Nottingham University. She has defended her brusque style of doing business: “People talk about me as hard and abrasive, but they also say she gets results. Business is about making money, it’s about making a profit. You can glamorise business as much as you want, but it’s about performance and being on the winning side.”

Narinder Kaur, 33: As a Punjabi woman who appeared on Big Brother 2, she surprised viewers by flashing her bottom at them. She subsequently attended a number of Asian functions, where her sartorial style was guaranteed to make even Mallika Sherawat feel overdressed. But she has faded from the limelight, moved from Leicester to London and lives happily with her husband and baby. She has been described unkindly as the “gobby, tarty reject from Big Brother”, but she is a good-hearted sort who was desperate to create a niche for herself in show business. She now says: “The Narinder Kaur I knew died in that house. I tell people I’m three-years old because that’s when I was reborn. Three years have gone by and people are still talking. Last week I went to a Sikh wedding and this group of blokes went up to my husband, completely ignoring me, and said, ‘You’re very good to allow her to do what she did?’ Allow? Where are we? Back in the Pind? I was showing British people that modern Indian girls could get drunk and have a laugh and still say their prayers. And you know what? Judging by the thousands of e-mails I received, a lot of Asian women were proud that I’d done that.”

Herjender, 35: Known as “Gos”, Herjender Gosal, from Southall, west London, was one of the livelier housemates in Big Brother 4 and made a lot of friends in the house. As a chef, he kept the housemates well fed during his time in the house. He now works as a chef in a posh London restaurant. Mostly unfairly, in poll results announced in May this year, Gos was voted the least popular housemate of all time.

Shahbaz Chaudhry, 37: The misfit from Glasgow walked out of the present Big Brother series after threatening to commit suicide. “I am a dead man walking,” he told housemates. “This is my last curtain call.” Shahbaz is still alive.