Halifax Today

Claire was so clear

UNLESS you were a "Brookie" fan, last week you would have been asking: "Who IS Claire Sweeney?"

The actress who plays bad girl Lindsey Corkhill in the Channel Four soap "Brookside" was a relative unknown. How different the story is a few days on.
Miss Sweeney is undoubtedly the toast of the town after managing to leave the "Big Brother" house relatively unscathed.
Of all the six housemates, she was the one who managed to give the least away - perhaps because there is little to reveal.
She came with no preconceptions - unlike Miss Feltz and Miss Turner - presumably because there weren't that many of us who had even heard of her.
If the others seemed like "B" list celebrities, then Miss Sweeney was struggling to make the "C" ranking.
However, this week there would be few who would argue that she has earned herself an "A" list star - not least for managing to keep her head when all around were losing theirs.
"I wasn't going to humiliate myself for ''Big Brother," she revealed in her first newspaper interview since the big release on Friday.
And she kept to her promises, as millions of viewers saw. It's just a pity she didn't pass on a few tips to the catatonic Miss Feltz, who with her blonde hair extensions and leopard-print pyjamas looked like a cross between one-time "Corrie" barmaid Bet Lynch and the late screen siren Diana Dors.
What puzzles me though is that as strange as the circumstances were, why wasn't the atmosphere in the house more up-beat and less serious? It was, after all, just a bit of fun, wasn't it? Once Eubank and Feltz had gone, the mood did lift until it was positively party time when just Sweeney, Dee and Duffy were left.
There should have been none of the competitive edge experienced by the original "Big Brother" unknown cast - they had their sights set on a cash reward. This celeb bunch was doing it for charity.