06 March 2024 , 19:30
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Celebrity Big Brother’s Louis Walsh was so determined to get some of the worst acts through on X Factor that he resorted to a startling strategy.
Louis Walsh is back on screen in ITV ’s Celebrity Big Brother with his former fellow X Factor judge Sharon Osbourne and the nostalgic reunion has delighted showbiz fans who loved watching the pair’s antics on the talent show.
They were known for their outrageous comments and actions while on the panel of Simon Cowell ’s singing show, with one particularly memorable outburst coming in 2005 when Mrs O threw a glass of water straight in the Westlife manager’s face. Afterwards Louis told the Sunday Mirror’s Notebook magazine that it was because he’d asked her if she was taking her husband Ozzy’s drugs.
While they are expected to be on better behaviour inside the CBB house and along with all the other contestants have been given "respect and inclusion" training before their appearance, the two stars, who are now good friends, aren’t known to play by the rules.
Fans of the X Factor will remember that Simon Cowell would always give Louis - who was a judge from 2004 when the show started until he was sensationally sacked in 2007 - the category with the worst or joke acts in.
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Louis, Sharon and Simon in 2004 (Getty Images)"Every year he'd give me the category with the worst acts, or the funny acts, and every year I'd think 'he's got to give me something good here' but he never would," he told the Irish Mirror in December last year.
"We never knew until we walked through that door, you know, who we'd got. That was the strange thing about it; people thought it was all a set-up, but we knew nothing. He did, but he never used to tell me or Sharon [Osbourne] a thing," he continued.
However, Louis developed a cheeky strategy to try and keep his hopefuls in the competition that even included him using his own money to try and secure their future.
"We'd have big campaigns to get votes, absolutely. If we really believed in one of our acts, we'd do everything we could to try and keep them in the competition. I used to vote for my own acts, absolutely. We would vote for the people we were very invested in, absolutely! I don't remember how much it used to cost us, but if we were invested, and we really wanted to win, we would do whatever it took," he added.
There was one act though who Louis knew he didn’t have to sit at home voting for endlessly. "I had Shayne Ward for Series Two. He was good, and I worked really hard with him because I knew I had a chance of winning. I got him a great song for the final. I knew that as long as I got him in the final, there was no way he was going to be beaten, because I'd got him Somewhere Over The Rainbow. Simon couldn't stop us, then. It was all real. We were all really working to win," he said.
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