EXCLUSIVE Man who vomited before partner romped with another lover on TV reveals what REALLY drove him to throw up in humiliating moment cut from Channel 4 show
Channel 4 's show, Open House: The Great Sex Experiment, sees couples try and open up their relationship with varying degrees of success.
Couple Tom and Lauren, from Devon, are one of several pairs on the programme and recently made headlines.
Scenes in a previous episode appeared to show Tom being sick after chatting to non-monogamy expert Effy Blue, who told the pair that they had to have sexual experiences with other people without each other.
However, the couple have revealed the reality behind the situation to MailOnline.
According to Tom and Lauren, the real reason for the strong reaction wasn't what viewers may think.
Lauren said: 'So Tom throwing up, they actually cut the scene. So that was actually because he had to be a life drawing model.'
During the episode, the couple are introduced to Gage and Olivia, who they build connections with.
'But, it was still nerve-wracking to meet Olivia and Gage,' Lauren added.
Tom agreed: 'It was really nervous in that sense. But yeah, it was mainly because I got so overwhelmed and it just took the toll on me, basically.'
In scenes previously obtained by MailOnline, Effy told viewers: 'Today is about challenging Tom to be independent.
'I'm curious to see how that will affect the dynamics they have between them. Lauren needs to be a partner to Tom, not a caretaker.'
When they returned to their room, Lauren told Tom: 'Don't be nervous. You absolutely got this.'
Lauren told the camera: 'It was my idea. It was my idea from the start. Yes it's throwing me and Tom in the deep end...
'But to be able to have him to have the confidence that we can go off, have our fun, come back to each other at the end of the night and it's absolutely insane.'
The voiceover said: 'But the thought of flying solo entirely naked isn't sitting well with Tom.'
Tom can then be heard being sick in the toilet and Lauren ran to him with some water.
Reflecting on the first episode they appeared in, Lauren described how it was 'cut a little differently to how we initially thought'.
She added: 'They made me out to be kind of like a experienced sex pest that basically irrelevant of Tom's health condition, wanted to swing and if we didn't, we'd break up.'
Tom was diagnosed with Bicuspid aortic valve, a heart condition that means the main valve does not work properly.
Lauren received some backlash online but admitted she expected some 'trolling'.
She said: 'So as you can imagine, the internet kind of went a bit crazy, but the second episode was so so much better and to be honest, I kind of knew that we'd get a bit of trolling anyway.
'It was more just the shock of watching how they cut it, which you never know how they're going to until, it obviously shows. It was just a little bit of a shock, it made up for it with the second one doing really good.'
The couple praised the show for bringing them closer together and boosting their confidence.
'We're both more confident in going out to parties we're more closer as a couple,' Tom said.
While Lauren reflected on how their communication had improved thanks to their time with the show's therapist, Effy.
She said: 'We spent a lot longer with Effy than the TV show actually showed.
'So we spent hours with her while we had our stay and it was really helpful.
'Communicating the little things and just how important that is, whether that's to do with the sex, the swinging, or even just to do stuff at home, it doesn't matter, and it's just definitely made us closer.'
Tom personally wanted to gain confidence in his appearance and the show has given him the boost he needed after struggling with his health diagnosis.
He said: 'When I was skinny before I got my health scare with the heart condition, I basically gained a lot of weight, being like 14 stone in muscle, then going straight up to like 19 and a half stone, because I couldn't do anything about it.
'I couldn't exercise, I couldn't do what I wanted to do. So basically, I just went to eating, getting really depressed, and I just got myself into a hole.
'And going on that TV programme has helped me massively, and it's also helped out a lot of other people as well, because I've been getting lots of good feedback from other people. So actually for me, it's helped me massively.'
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Times
an hour ago
- Times
Educating Yorkshire: what happened next at the school TV made famous
It is the final throes of the summer holidays and like secondary schools up and down the country, Thornhill Community Academy is waiting. It is waiting for GCSE results day and the relief, dumbfounded delight and disappointment it brings. It is waiting for the new school year to start on September 2 and for its 900-odd pupils to cascade down the residential street in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, where it sits surrounded by prim grey bungalows, and fill up corridors and classrooms again. Unlike any other secondary school, Thornhill is also waiting for its close-up. Twelve years after Channel 4's Educating Yorkshire turned this school into one of the most famous in the country, the cameras are back: a new eight-episode series, filmed over seven weeks between November 2024 and August 2025, airs next weekend. 'Now it's going to be on TV, I just have to keep my fingers crossed,' says Mel Delaney-Hudson, 44, Thornhill's assistant head and a maths teacher, whose first series appearances — when she was still a trainee — were limited to the occasional shot in a corridor, 'that it comes out how we want it to.' It is hard to recall quite the grip that the original fly-on-the wall series had on viewers. Thornhill was a mixed-sex secondary academy in Kirklees — with a catchment both rural and urban — built in the 1960s, running from years 7 to 11. But much of what happened at Thornhill could have been seen at any other school: kids quarrelled; teachers dished out detentions; pupils did or didn't do their homework. And it was this lack of remarkability, coupled with the industry of teachers and students trying their best, that made people care. In 2013 much of the nation was unified in its desperation for Safiyyah to get a C in English so she could train to be an air hostess; we could see that poor Grant, despite receiving 29 detentions in a month, was a good kid at heart; we longed for the unlucky-in-love Year 9 head Mr Moses to find a girlfriend. The humanity of the first series — plus the coincidence of the show landing just before streaming services splintered TV audiences for good — meant it pulled in 3.4 million viewers. It went on to win an Emmy, a National Television award and a Royal Television Society award. Thornhill was suddenly famous. 'We went on a school trip to New York and people were running across Times Square to see us,' says the school's head teacher, Matthew Burton. 'Nuts.' The head teacher in series one was Mr Mitchell — tough, fair, straight-talking. He left Thornhill for another school in Leeds in 2015. Burton got the job in 2018. A lot of the original interest in the show, I suspect, was in him. In the first series Burton was a standout English teacher. He created the series' most powerful moment when, in the finale, he was inspired by The King's Speech to help a Year 11 student called Musharaf overcome a serious stammer. Musharaf ended up standing in front of his year group to deliver a speech while teachers and pupils — and every viewer — wept: dynamite television. Burton says that the reception was 'nuts', but 'those things don't happen because lightning struck. That happened because that lad knew it was safe to get it wrong, that he wasn't going to be judged or picked on or laughed at.' By any metric, the world of Thornhill Community Academy (or to give it its full name, Thornhill Community Academy, a Share Academy — one of four secondary and four primary schools in West Yorkshire run by the Share Multi Academy Trust) has changed a huge amount in the 12 years since we last saw teens being frogmarched to the school office to wipe off their foundation, and chucking jotters down the corridors. Across the country, schools are struggling. There is a chronic shortage of teachers, especially in low-income areas including Thornhill's, and in subjects such as maths, physics and languages. According to a recent report from the National Foundation for Educational Research, overall teacher vacancies are at their highest rate on record, with more than six posts per 1,000 unfilled in 2024; in secondary schools, recruitment in 2024-25 reached only 62 per cent of what the Department for Education estimates is needed to meet the demand. Teachers are quitting in droves, blaming pupil behaviour, stagnant pay and inflexible working practices. Meanwhile NHS data finds that one in five children and young people have a common mental health problem such as anxiety or depression. Schools are still recovering from the seismic disruption of Covid. If in 2013 realism was its strength, in 2025 Educating Yorkshire runs the risk of feeling a bit too real. On an August day, just back from his summer holiday, Burton, 42, doesn't seem like a head under pressure. In his office, where he is joined today by the assistant head Delaney-Hudson and the deputy head Zoe Ali, who didn't work at Thornhill last time the cameras were in town, there is a whiteboard scrawled with attendance figures, a sign with the school motto, 'Be nice, work hard', and shelves stacked with GCSE English texts (Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck; Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth), the Quran and an Oxford English dictionary. In the first series, with his slightly-too-long hair, slightly-too-baggy suits and inability to do up his top button, Burton resembled the (charmingly) unkempt lead singer of a second-rate indie band. But he had the drive and energy of a head in the making, leaping up on to a chair to read to a class, as interested in his most disruptive students as his most diligent. These days the tailoring is nattier, the hair neater, but he's still the same Mr Burton — upbeat, unpretentious, a bit of a joker, authoritative but never authoritarian. Delaney-Hudson is shyer, bright and deadpan, and 39-year-old Ali, poised, sincere, dressed in silver jewellery and spiky stilettos, is the sort of woman who commands quiet respect — at least from me. Things at Thornhill are, broadly, fine. The school scored 'good' in its latest Ofsted report from 2023. Its GCSE results are below national average — in 2024, 61.6 per cent achieved five or more GCSEs at grades 9-4 (or A*-C), compared with 67.4 per cent nationwide. But the school exceeds national averages in some areas: according to its 8 score in progress — which tracks academic improvement between the end of primary and the end of secondary — pupils achieved an average of a third of a grade higher per subject at GCSE than other pupils nationally who started secondary school with the same Year 6 SATs grades. In its report, Ofsted highlighted that 'leaders' values and actions are inspirational for staff' and that 'the behaviour of many pupils in lessons is excellent'. So why risk throwing a camera crew back in? The school thought carefully about it, consulting the trust, teachers, pupils and parents, but in the end it seemed too good a chance to pass up. 'We're really proud of what we do here,' says Burton, who was appointed head teacher when the school became part of the Share trust. 'And this is a unique opportunity to show what we do.' Filming involved 64 fixed rig cameras in place for 35 filming days, additional shots captured using handheld cameras, and a production team on site from 6am until 6pm, capturing almost a thousand hours of footage. Producers took a rigorous duty of care towards the students, with parents shown their children's individual contributions and invited to flag anything of concern. Most of the current pupils have watched the original series. 'They say, 'Sir, did you know you were on Educating Yorkshire?' ' Burton says with a smile. 'But it's not the main thing that's happening at this school. It may feel like it — we're here in the holidays. But it's not.' • Read more parenting advice, interviews, real-life stories and opinions Frankly, it couldn't be — in 2025 there's too much else going on. The prelapsarian age of the first series — huge laptops, no smartphones, only Facebook for social media — has vanished. Today's teachers are educating teenagers in a world of TikTok, ChatGPT and Andrew Tate. In one episode in series two, while some staff try to determine whether a student has used AI to write an essay about Macbeth, others worry about an elaborate fake video circulating on Snapchat. About 40 per cent of last year's Year 7 intake scored below the national average for reading in their SATs. Burton and co are concerned that screen time is to blame. 'Schools are almost unrecognisable from 12 or 13 years ago,' he says. 'In 2025 we're dealing with 2025 issues.' At Thornhill, if smartphones are 'seen, heard, used, they are confiscated', he says. In other words, an 'out of sight' policy, which is stronger than the 10 per cent of secondary schools that don't have any kind of smartphone protocol, but definitely at the more lenient end of the spectrum — many secondary schools are now banning phones from campus or making pupils lock them away at the start of the day. Part of the battle at Thornhill is convincing parents that smartphones are a problem. Staff have run sessions for parents and carers about how to monitor children's online activity, and have had 'robust' conversations with families about kids' screen time 'because it's happening on their watch', says Ali, who as deputy head is in charge of the school's pastoral care. When it comes to AI, the school has introduced 'live marking' — where teachers assess work as it's done in the classrooms instead of after kids have taken it home. 'So teachers are going around with a highlighter, making sure that students are working independently on tasks and helping them,' Burton says. They have trained staff in how to identify something that might have been written using ChatGPT. 'The last thing you want as a teacher is to be going, 'What?'' he says. 'It's always going to happen, of course, because there's always a new app that could spring up overnight.' But teachers and parents cannot crack the highly specific algorithms that put figures such as the misogynist Tate, whose videos deliberately prey on the vulnerabilities of young men, into their sons' bedrooms. 'In terms of the boys, we're doing a lot of work breaking down toxic masculinity,' Ali says. 'They're accessing things online and can see this portrayal of what, stereotypically, it means to be a strong male. We're not here to teach the students what to think, we're here to teach them how to think — 'Where have you got that information from?' 'What makes you think that way?' 'What is it about this particular individual, whether it be Andrew Tate or anybody else, that you agree with, and why?' Sometimes it's knowing the right questions to ask.' This particular group of teenagers were in primary school when Covid struck. The years after the pandemic have been 'about picking things up and working through issues caused by Covid, and making sure the students are ready to get back to face-to-face education, making sure that we run the very best school that we possibly can', Burton says. 'We're seeing more and more students suffering with anxiety, with social and emotional regulation, school refusers,' says Delaney-Hudson, who is the assistant head for special educational needs and disabilities (Send). She wonders 'whether we're seeing an impact of Covid on the Year 11s who had a significant period of time where they were at home, no routine'. Nearly 16 per cent of Thornhill students are eligible for Send support. Her advice to teachers is 'to know your kids. No child comes to school to be naughty or get into trouble or disappoint parents. There's always a reason.' She is clear that 'our expectations for these students are exactly the same for all students. They're really, really high.' Despite the school's 'Be nice, work hard' motto — Burton's personal credo — they are serious about discipline. Staff in high-vis patrol corridors and stand sentry in the lunch hall (Ali averages 16,000 steps a day — 'all done in stiletto heels'). At Thornhill, in the small town of Dewsbury, about eight miles south of Leeds, more than a third of pupils are eligible for free school meals, compared with a national average of 25.7 per cent. 'Some of them are in very different and difficult circumstances from how I grew up,' Burton says. According to a pupil is identified as a 'persistent absentee' if they miss 10 per cent or more school days a term. Thornhill's persistent absence rate is 27.8 per cent, compared with a national average of 17.8 per cent. 'Attendance is a massive priority for us,' says Ali, who in the mornings takes the school minibus out to the homes of 'students who we know struggle to come into school, and if they're ready we'll bring them in and get them into the classroom'. Great, but teenagers are no mugs. 'You're in danger of creating a rod for your own back as students become used to that, treating it like a taxi service. It's not that — it's for students where we know there are specific reasons it might be difficult for them to get into school.' Considering all of this — not to mention the marking, budget cuts, exam pressures, stagnant wages, long hours and dealing with parents — it is fair to ask why on earth anyone would be a teacher. 'There's nothing like being in that classroom when you've got 32 students and you can see them hanging on your every word,' Delaney-Hudson says. 'Because they want to do it not only for themselves, their families, but for you. It drives you.' Not everyone is cut out for it, obviously. 'You could walk away with a PhD and come in here and get eaten alive,' she says. 'You've either got it or you haven't. And if you haven't — well, then the kids don't deserve that. So go find something else.' What makes a successful teacher? 'Being patient, level-headed and understanding they're teenagers,' she says. 'What may seem really absurd or defiant to an adult might be a really bad, hormonal day for a young lady who's fallen out with her mum, who's been told to wipe her make-up off, had to drop her siblings off at school, whose hair's not gone right this morning, who's fallen out with her friends. And I'm going to start saying, 'What, you've not got a pen?' Really?' 'Teenagers will make mistakes,' Burton says. 'They'll do things that are daft. But they are remarkably resilient in a really quite difficult world.' Teachers have an outsized role in their lives. 'I think one of the biggest strengths of schools is that every person has that one teacher you look back on who was there for you. And wanted to help you fight those battles you go through at secondary school.' Just as Musharaf, the pupil who overcame his stammer, proved he could. He is in touch occasionally. Now 28, he studied broadcast journalism at the University of Huddersfield after he left school, and now — amazingly — is a motivational speaker. Burton changed his life. 'He comes back and speaks to our kids sometimes, and he's almost like a unicorn. They speak in hushed tones about him — 'Is he real?' He's a fully grown adult man now, which is always weird.' Burton adds: 'It's a real privilege for cameras to have been there, in that moment. But these things do happen every single day, in classrooms up and down the country.' Educating Yorkshire is available to stream on Channel 4 at 8pm on August 31
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
The thong bikini boom: why the skimpiest swimwear is back
There are plenty of places where no one would bat an eyelid at the sight of a thong bikini; on a beach in Brazil or around the Love Island fire pit, visible butt cheeks are practically de rigueur. But my first sighting this year was not while surfing in Australia or sunbathing in the Caribbean, but at an open-water swimming spot, on a rainy day in Scotland. I should not have been surprised. Tiny swimwear is huge news this summer. It is no longer confined to sunny climes, but cropping up everywhere from lidos to leisure centres – and lochs, apparently. The trickle down from catwalks and influencers to holidaymakers and shoppers is notable. A search for 'thong bikini' on Asos yields 187 results, ranging from high-leg styles, to side-tie, to tanga (somewhere between a thong and a standard brief), while high-street outlets including H&M, Calzedonia and Zara all have thong bikini bottoms in their collections. And, as with any trend, there are plenty of celebrity forerunners, including gymnast Simone Biles, model Heidi Klum, actor Sofía Vergara and singer Nicole Scherzinger. Rapper Lizzo is a longtime fan. 'I won't lie, it was nerve-racking initially,' says Victoria, 29, who wore a thong bikini for the first time on a recent solo trip to Naples. As for many new converts, part of the appeal lay in the fact that she would be able to avoid the significant tan lines created by fuller coverage swimwear. 'I saw thong bikinis everywhere and wished I could wear one. But then I thought about it and was like, it's just a bum. Men wear those teeny-tiny trunks where you see everything, so why can't I wear this? Plus, it was really comfy.' The itsy-bitsy bikini revolution may have come to the fore this summer, but it has been rumbling for some time. In 2023, the New York Times declared that 'more women are adopting the 'less is more' philosophy' when it comes to beachwear; the same year, fashion site Who What Wear called thong bikinis the 'controversial swimwear trend you'll see on every beach this summer'. In 2024, New Zealand site The Spinoff asked: 'Why is every bikini bottom a thong now?' 'I think we've moved into another age of body consciousness – a much more expressive moment,' says Shaun Cole, associate professor in fashion at the University of Southampton. 'People are saying: 'It's my body and I can show it off in ways that I choose to, and if that involves wearing clothing that is sometimes deemed socially unacceptable then I'm going to do that.'' Gen Z, in particular, are less inclined to restrict themselves to clothes deemed to be 'flattering' – a term that has fallen spectacularly out of favour. Thong bikinis, once the preserve of those who conformed to a particular body type, are now being manufactured in a more inclusive range of sizes and marketed more diversely. 'Women of all shapes and sizes are leaning into bolder cuts with real confidence as part of a wider cultural shift towards body positivity and self-expression, which is great to see,' says Aliya Wilkinson, founder of luxury swimwear label Ôsalé. Her brand doesn't yet offer thong styles, but she plans to introduce them in the future. 'In the west, fashion has long found ways to augment the butt, to make it look bigger and put emphasis on this part of the female body,' says Roberta Sassatelli, professor of sociology at the University of Bologna and co-author of Body and Gender. 'This is perhaps because the butt is deemed to be very sensual but is not related to reproduction. Because it is totally related to pleasure, it feels more liberated.' The trend is reflected in the popularity of potentially dangerous cosmetic procedures, such as Brazilian butt lifts. Sculpting the perfect behind has also become something of a fitness obsession. In 2018, sports writer Anna Kessel noted that 'the emphasis on a firm, or 'juicy', bottom has now overtaken the flat stomach as the fitness holy grail in mainstream women's health magazines', with an increasing number of gym classes dedicated exclusively to the posterior. Seven years later, could it be that gym-goers are keen to display the results? 'I think the popularity of thong bikinis exists at the convergence of a focus on building glutes in the gym, a kind of exhibitionist creep in which the butt is one of the last frontiers that had remained mostly covered in public, and a greater cultural acceptance of a range of different body types,' says historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of Fit Nation. 'The low-slung jeans of the early 2000s were certainly correlated with the age when flat abs workouts were all the rage.' Cole suggests there may be another reason why more people are choosing to wear less. 'It could be linked to what's been called the 'pornification' of culture and style,' he says, citing an idea put forward by fashion historian Pamela Church Gibson. '[It is] modelled on a style that has come out of pornography – at the points where pornography stars are dressed – which involves garments such as tiny bikinis or thong-style underwear. There's an acceptance of that style without people really realising where it originated. The popularity of shows such as Love Island, where people are there to show off their bodies as a way of attracting a partner, again ties to that pornification of style.' After years of falling audience figures, Love Island is also experiencing a boom this summer: increased numbers tuned in to watch the UK and US versions, with the New York Times attributing the popularity of the latter to its ability to offer reprieve during 'times of societal and economic hardship'. As dress and design historian Amber Butchart put it when curating Splash!, a recent exhibition on swimming and style at the Design Museum in London: 'Swimwear's close relationship with the body means it reflects changing attitudes to modesty, morality and public display. From the 18th century, bathing machines were used to protect sea dippers from prying eyes. But throughout the 20th century, a number of boundary-pushing designs challenged previous ideas of decency while also courting controversy. For the last century, what we wear while swimming has been used as an excuse to police bodies.' While it is predominantly women who are opting for poolside thongs today, this wasn't always the case. The earliest iteration of the style is thought to be the ancient loincloth, worn by men. Modern thongs are said to have been adopted in 1939, when the mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia, ordered that showgirls must cover themselves rather than perform nude at the city's World's Fair. When it comes to swimwear specifically, Austrian-American Rudi Gernreich – the fashion designer behind the monokini, or 'topless bikini' – is most often credited with creating the thong bikini, in response to Los Angeles city council banning public nudity, including naked sunbathing, in 1974. The thong bikini has prompted similar bans more recently. In January, a council in Greater Sydney, Australia, banned thong and (even skimpier) G-string bikinis at its public pools. A number of women have also been arrested for wearing thong bikinis in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where the style is banned. In the UK, Greenwich Leisure Ltd, which operates 240 leisure centres under the brand Better, requires swimmers to wear 'full-coverage bikinis', which a spokesperson previously indicated did imply 'that thongs wouldn't be acceptable'. But even when thong styles are not prohibited, many bikini-wearers remain nervous. 'I do own one, but it's only been worn once, when my partner and I had a private villa in Portugal,' says Rebecca, 33. Even then, she says, she felt a little too exposed. 'I don't understand why someone would wear one on a family holiday, for example. Thong bikinis feel quite sexualised, so to me it seems inappropriate. Give me high-waisted bikini bottoms that cover your cheeks any day.' For Sassatelli, the reason thong bikinis are in vogue is not so surprising. 'The thong has never gone away completely,' she says. 'But for people who are in their teens and 20s, they haven't really been 'in fashion'. Once [the fashion industry] has forgotten something, then it can be recuperated – and it makes for a little sense of novelty.'
The Sun
3 hours ago
- The Sun
Real Madrid icon leaves locals stunned as he pops into Scots pub for a curry – before returning the very next night
A REAL MADRID icon left local punters stunned after popping into a Scots pub for a slap-up Indian feast with pals. He also watched his beloved hometown team in action. 4 4 4 Wales legend Gareth Bale headed to The Glendevon Hotel in Auchterarder, Perthshire where he enjoyed tucking into a Tikka Masala cooked by chef Mandeep Saini - who previously delighted customers at the world-famous Gleneagles hotel. The ex-Tottenham star enjoyed the experience so much, the party returned the following night for more football and curry. And he got the result he'd have hoping for too as he watched hometown club Cardiff City beat Swindon 2-1. The 35-year-old, who retired from the game two years ago after a stellar career in which he won five Champions Leagues with Madrid and 111 caps for his country, delighted locals with his 'down-to-earth' charm. He even posed for snaps and signed autographs. The bar manager told the Scottish Sun: "I suspect they were all staying at Gleneagles which is just nearby, but they came here both nights. "He and a few of his pals came along around 6pm, they chose to sit facing the big screens to catch the game - it's the best view in the house. "They had a big feast cooked by our chef Mandeep - who still cooks the delicious recipes he used at Gleneagles. "It obviously went down well - we couldn't believe when they walked back through the doors for round two on Tuesday night. "He was so lovely, polite and down to earth. Micah Richards gasps 'you said that?' as Gareth Bale makes shock revelation live on TV "There was a bit of a crowd on Tuesday night, with the talk spreading through the town, and Gareth was so happy to chat and pose for pictures for fans. "We'd gladly welcome him back - what a lovely customer." It is thought the star, who is well known for his love of golf and has cut his handicap from 'three or four' to just 0.1 since retiring from football, was staying at Gleneagles. Famous faces are often spotted at the quaint, bustling town - with luxury hotel often playing host to the likes of Rod Stewart, Jennifer Lawrence and prince William and Kate.
