Kelly looked like she had been slapped in the face. Sally’s anger had risen up so quickly that her fists were clenched and it almost seemed that she would lash out.

In the monitoring bunker they twiddled desperately at their controls to get the hot-head remotes to swivel and focus on the relevant faces. Geraldine ordered both operators in the camera runs to push their dollies round to the girls’ bedroom immediately. That rarest of all events in reality television seemed to be developing: a moment of genuine, spontaneous drama.

“Hey, steady on, Sally,” said Dervla. “Kelly’s entitled to her opinion.”

“Not if it’s oppressive of minorities, she isn’t.”

“I haven’t got an opinion,” wailed Kelly, tears springing up in her eyes. “Honestly.”

“You do, you just don’t recognize your own bigotry!” Sally snapped. “Everybody hates and stigmatizes the mentally ill and blames them for society’s problems. They’re denied treatment, ignored by the system and then when once in a blue moon something happens, like some poor schizo who never should have been returned to the community gets stuck inside their own dark box and sticks a knife in someone’s head or whatever, suddenly every mild depressive in the country is a murderer and it’s just ignorant fucking bollocks!”

Sally was getting more and more upset. The other girls had not seen this side of her before. The knuckles on her clenched fists had turned white; there were angry tears in her eyes.

Kelly appeared horrified to have been the cause of all this hurt, but also astonished at how emotional Sally had so quickly become. “I’m sorry, Sally, all right?” Kelly said. “If I’ve said something stupid I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, but really there’s no need to cry about it.”

“I’m not fucking crying!” Sally shouted.

Moon had been lying on her bed listening to the conversation with a look of tolerant bemusement on her face. Now she raised herself up and joined in. “Sally’s right, but she’s also wrong,” she said with a patronizing air of authority. “Woggle ain’t genuinely mad, he’s just a twat with body odour, but on the other hand I wouldn’t be too certain about how nice and cosy the average loony is, Sally…”

Sally tried to interrupt angrily but Moon continued.

“Or ‘people with mental health issues’ as you choose to put it. I’ve seen nutters, real nutters, dangerous fookin’ bastard nutters, and let me tell you, darling, society’s right to be scared of them, I know I fookin’ was.”

“That is just ignorant shit,” said Sally. “What would you know about it? How would you know anything about the mentally ill?”

“Well, what would you know about it yourself, Sally?” said Dervla thoughtfully. Her face had a slightly troubled look about it.

But before Sally could answer Dervla’s question, Moon pressed on. “I know plenty about it, Sally!” she barked, seeming suddenly to be as upset as the other girl, “and I’ll tell you why: because I spent two years, did you hear me, love? Two fookin’ years in a mental hospital. Have you got that? A hospital for the insane, a loony bin and that is why, Sally, I fookin’ hate nutters.”

For a moment the room fell silent. The other girls were simply astonished at this sudden and unexpected bombshell.

“You never did,” said Kelly. “You’re having a laugh.”

But it appeared that Moon was not having a laugh.

“So don’t tell me about people with mental health issues, Sally! I lived with them, I slept in their rooms, ate at their tables, walked the same corridors, stared at the same shitty walls for two years. So don’t give me any of that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest crap! Like they’re the bloody sane ones – the fookin’ heroes.”

Sally clearly wanted to reply, but could find no words in the face of Moon’s onslaught, which continued unabated: “Oh yeah, I’m sure there’s plenty of nice ones about the place, plenty of nice sweet little manic-depressives who don’t hurt anybody but their mums and dads and themselves… but I’m talking about nutters. The ones that scream and tear at themselves in the night. All night! The ones that lash out when you pass them on the ward, trick you with their cunning, grab you, touch you, fookin’ try and eat you.”

The other four young women sat on their beds and stared at Moon. Sally’s passion had come as a surprise, but this was something more, much, much more. This was shocking. Moon had been so cheerful, so funny right from the first day, and now this.

“But why? Why were you there, Moon?” Dervla’s voice was calm. Sweet and reassuring, like a doctor’s or a priest’s, but those who knew her would have heard the anxiety in it. They would have known that she was scared. “Were you ill?”

“No, I wasn’t ill,” said Moon bitterly. “But my fookin’ uncle was ill. My uncle is a sad sick ill bastard.” She stopped, and seemed to be considering whether to go on.

Layla asked if she wanted a hand to hold. Moon ignored her.

“He abused me, right? Not the full business, never rape, but plenty enough. A year it went on until one day I told my ma, that cow. I can say it now because she’s dead. I never thought she’d believe her brother and not me, but he was a powerful man in the local community, I suppose, a doctor. And he had friends, counsellors, other doctors and the like, and between them they managed to make it all look my fault. I was a nasty lying little slut and a dangerous fantasist to boot. Maybe it woulda’ been different if me dad had been around, but God knows where he is. God knows who he is.”

“They managed to get you committed?” Dervla asked, astonished.

“Yeah, you wouldn’t have thought it could happen, would you? To a young teenage girl, in our day and age, but it did, and I got put away for trying to tell the world that I’d been touched up by my uncle.”

There was silence in the room. For the first time since they had all entered the house, nobody had anything to say.

The silence was echoed in the monitoring bunker, where Bob Fogarty, Pru, his assistant editor, various production managers and all their PAs were stunned.

“That is incredible,” said Fogarty.

“Yes, it is, isn’t it?” said the voice of Geraldine Hennessy. “An incredible load of bollocks.”

They turned round in surprise. Nobody had noticed Geraldine enter the bunker, but in fact she had been watching for some time. She had come on from dinner with her current boyfriend in tow, a beautiful nineteen-year-old dancer whom she had met backstage at the Virgin summer pop festival.

“I never thought Moon would be the one to go for the lying trick, I really didn’t. I must say I’m impressed.”

“She’s lying?” the various editors and PAs asked in astonishment.

“Of course she’s lying, you stupid bunch of cunts. Do you really thing I’d put an abused kid out of a loony hospital into my happy little game show? Bollocks! Woggle’s as mad as I go. That bald bitch’s mum and dad are alive and well and living in Rusholme. He’s a tobacconist, she works in a dry cleaner’s.”

There was great relief in the bunker at this and also excitement. It seemed that perhaps the game inside the house might turn out to be more interesting than they had feared.

“Look at her smirking to herself ’cos it’s dark and the others can’t see,” Geraldine said, pointing at one of the remote camera feeds. “She knows we can see, though, oh yes! She’s having a laugh, isn’t she? She knows the public loves a stirrer. You get much more famous being naughty than nice. Get me a coffee, will you, Darren? Use the machine in my office, not the shite this lot drink.”

The impossibly beautiful nineteen-year-old boy grumpily stirred his perfect body and went off to do as he was bidden.

“Lucky you did your research, Geraldine,” Fogarty remarked. “If you didn’t know Moon was lying I imagine we’d all be pretty nervous now.”