Less than 24 hours after leaving the Big Brother house, Colin Ridley is already exhibiting the standard symptoms of a reality TV exit: excessive caffeine, a phone that will not stop vibrating, and the abrupt requirement to process emotions in public.
“It’s honestly surreal,” he says. “My Instagram is bombed, bro. I’ve already had five coffees.”
In between calling me “brev,” Colin also talks about Holly, with the slightly dazed devotion of someone still suspended in a televised love narrative.
What happens to their relationship now that it no longer exists inside a contained environment with a built-in audience? His answer is hopeful, if vague.
“I feel like for us in the Big Brother house, it’s a high pressure cooker environment. And I feel like the fact that we stood by each other, we were each other’s constant, each other’s rock…. It’s going to be very refreshing and very, very elite, brev, to just see where things go in the outside world,” he says.
Inside the house, their relationship served as one of the season’s primary storylines and its most dependable point of friction. Colin is 21. Holly is 31. The ten-year age gap became a standing point of analysis among both housemates and viewers, interpreted variously as harmless chemistry or a sociological red flag.
Fellow contestant Abiola put it most plainly: a 21-year-old boy often has the maturity of a teenager, while women, especially women ten years older, generally do not.
The house’s eldest resident was even less theoretical. After multiple run-ins with their PDA, 67-year-old Jane convened a house meeting to formally object. “I don’t want to walk in on it,” she said. “If my sons were having a big snog session on my couch, I’d probably give them a whack.”
Colin remains unmoved by the discourse, praising Holly as an amazing person. Asked whether the age gap is an issue, he dismisses it without hesitation. “Not at all,” he says. “Man, I look at her and I see the most beautiful, intelligent, smart, amazing woman in the world. I don’t see anything about a number or an age or anything like that.”
His post-eviction declaration of love was met with enthusiastic approval from home. “All my mates have been so proud,” he says. “I nearly teared up.” They even sent him a video of themselves watching the Grand Finale episode together, which he describes as his “podium win.”
His central takeaway from the experience is simpler than the discourse around it. A letter from his mum near the finale, he says, reframed everything. His goal was to make her proud. Then he met Holly, and wanted to make her proud too. Somewhere near the end, he realised he had also been making a case for himself.
As he puts it: “My biggest takeaway was to prove to people, to prove to the world that people like me, without a plan, who don’t really feel like they fit into the mould or the status quo, that it doesn’t matter. You can achieve anything. You can do anything. I didn’t even think Holly would speak to me, bro. And look where we’re at now.”
