
Irvine Welsh on the trigger warning for his Trainspotting sequel: ‘It wasn't my idea'
Irvine Welsh 's debut novel painted a bleak picture of post-industrial Britain through the experiences of a group of drug addicts in Leith, an Edinburgh suburb, and was written mostly in patois. 'C--t' was the 25th word; Welsh once reckoned that he used it a further 835 times. (The book was longlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize, but did not make the shortlist after offending the 'feminist sensibilities' of two of the judges.) It went on to sell millions of copies and was adapted into Danny Boyle's acclaimed 1996 film.
So it's a surprise that copies of Men in Love, billed as the 'immediate sequel' to Trainspotting, come with a trigger warning (labelled here as an 'author's note').
'As a novel set in the 1980s, many of the characters in Men in Love, as in society in general, express themselves in ways that we now consider offensive and discriminatory. As a work of fiction, Men in Love aims to replicate the speech patterns commonly used by many people in this era,' it reads. 'This is certainly not an endorsement (or even a condemnation) of such behaviours; merely an attempt to authentically replicate them through the voices of the characters in the Men in Love story.'
So when I meet Welsh in a North London pub, the obvious question is: why the disclaimer? 'It wasn't my idea,' he sighs. 'What publishers – kind of correctly – get concerned about now in the internet age, is that everything is decontextualised. Somebody could take one line of this book, stick it on the internet and say, 'He's a Nazi,' or 'He's a communist,' or 'He's a sex offender.''
This pearl-clutching sensibility is relatively new. 'I remember back in the day that publishers wanted as much controversy as possible, but now it's like, 'No.' I'm hoping Kneecap [the controversial Irish rap trio] have changed the landscape on all that. The playbook is: keep your head down; don't alienate anybody; don't upset anybody.'
That's like saying not to be interesting, I offer.
'Yeah, it definitely is,' he says. 'I'm doing an author's note, and I'm not condoning or condemning,' Welsh says. 'You don't f---ing condone or condemn. It's none of your business as a writer. All you do is just depict: it's a novel… Now, if people are being f---ing lazy and stupid and choose to decontextualise that, it's not my problem. But it is the way the world is, unfortunately.'
'[The note] was literally an afterthought, and not my afterthought,' he says. (Unlike many such trigger warnings, it is buried at the back of the book.)
Still, the hard-living enfant terrible of British literature appears to have mellowed somewhat now that he is 66: rather than a beer, Welsh asks for a lime-and-soda, and he credits the fact that he's in 'reasonable nick for my age' to his regular boxing sessions. Welsh, a passionate fan of Hibernian Football Club, pairs his garish yellow jacket with a T-shirt that has the slogan 'Football without fans is nothing' across it.
His characters, by contrast, have stayed the same in Men in Love. The novel picks up where Trainspotting ended, as the friends deal with the fallout of Renton betraying them by absconding to Amsterdam with all of the money from their big drug deal. It's the dog days of Margaret Thatcher's premiership; the language is still filthy and the behaviour is often despicable. It's also the fifth of Welsh's novels to star this cast. What keeps drawing him back to them?
'They're kind of my go-to to understand the world.' He points at his bald temple. 'They're lodged in there. I don't think about them at all until I come to write them. Because as soon as I put pen to paper, as soon as I start typing, it just all comes flooding out… If you leave them alone, they'll basically write the story for you. You just try not to get in the way too much.'
But the way Welsh brings the characters to life is unorthodox. He has 'masses' of longhand notes and vignettes about the cast filed away, and it's only once a theme emerges in the stories that he decides to turn the notes into a book – otherwise he has 'no interest in publishing them'.
The theme for Men in Love is, well, falling in love. Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie have tried to leave heroin behind and now are pursuing human connections to replace the lost highs. The idea came to Welsh after his second marriage – to Beth Quinn, an American 23 years his junior – ended about eight years ago and he started dating again. He says he started going out with women who were 'more age-appropriate, for want of a better term' and was pleasantly surprised by those he met.
'They'd been through everything, they knew who they were, what they wanted to do and all that... and they took no f---ing s--- from guys,' he says. 'What should have been quite intimidating was actually incredibly refreshing, because it meant you could just get rid of all the old bulls--- and start to relate to them with honest, open, one-to-one communication. And that, in turn, made me think about myself and my friends, about my age, how we show up in relationships.'
Things were very different when Welsh was dating in his 20s – he 'didn't have a f---ing clue' – and 'I thought, what a great opportunity to put these guys who have completely f---ed up anyway, who know nothing, who are addicted to drugs or addicted to some… compulsive, obsessive behaviour' into such scenarios. Trainspotting fans will not be surprised to know that Renton is earnest and really tries romantically; Spud is a loser; Sick Boy enjoys the thrill of the chase and Begbie is a psychopath who becomes violent if it's even suggested that he's gay. Welsh, for his part, married the former Taggart actress Emma Currie (who is seven years younger than him) in 2022.
Welsh has kept returning to these characters' stories but his five novels about them are not chronological. 'If I had any sense, I would have done them in order… and built a f---ing franchise like any sensible, commercially astute, aware writer would have done,' he says. It also means that it's vanishingly unlikely that a film of Men in Love, starring original Trainspotting stars such as Ewan McGregor and Robert Carlyle, will be made. Welsh does, however, suggest the whole lot will be adapted as a new TV series at some point, because 'that's the way everyone's going now, isn't it?'
Welsh is an unlikely literary icon. Growing up in Edinburgh's Muirhouse, he left school at 16 and did a brief stint as a TV mechanic until one afternoon, when he was on the wrong end of a powerful electric shock. A period of menial jobs followed, including dishwashing and paving roads, during which he developed a heroin habit. He was addicted for about 18 months and quit by going cold turkey.
During his 20s he tried, and failed, to make it as a punk rocker in a succession of bands in Edinburgh and London. By the late 1980s he worked in local government in the Scottish capital and, so the story goes, much of Trainspotting was written while he was at work. The novel's success meant he could give up his middle-management job.
All of that is long behind him now. He is rich and famous, and splits his time between homes in Camden, North London, Edinburgh and Miami. It must be difficult to get back into that 1980s Leith mindset, and lexicon, I suggest. 'It's the easiest thing to do, really,' he insists. 'I spend a lot of time in Edinburgh, and I spend it with the guys that I knew and hung out with. In some ways, we're in an 80s time warp.'
He adds: 'We still go out, we go to the occasional rave. So everything feels… It's a bit sad actually – we've not moved on 40 years later.'
Welsh is an engaging conversationalist but, despite his sunny demeanour, much about the modern world appears to unsettle him. Take artificial intelligence, which threatens to put swathes of white-collar workers and creative types out of work en masse, much like the blue-collar workers of Leith in the 1980s.
The thinking around AI is the wrong way around, in Welsh's view. 'If I went to ChatGPT and tried to get it to write a novel for me, or give me a first draft of a novel, what would I spend my time doing?' he asks. Really, he says, 'you want ChatGPT to wash the dishes while you write a novel – you know what I mean? – not the other way around. Otherwise, I don't know, we can shovel s--- or pick up litter outside while the robots are writing all these novels that you've read a million times before?'
The danger is that individuals become reduced to 'this f---ing daft, shambling, flesh robot that presses this button and you have your needs met. It's this incredibly dystopian place of humanity we've gone into.' (On a more hopeful note, Welsh reckons 'people are going to reject [AI]' in favour of man-made output.)
When it comes to the economy and politics, there's less for him to be optimistic about. 'We're coming to the end of capitalism,' says Welsh, ever the Left-winger. 'We've not been able to eke it out in a sensible way.' The biggest problem is what he sees as a hoarding of resources at the top of society that has squashed aspirations for those below.
'You have to have consumers; you have to have people with money to spend. And everything's being sucked out of the economy now. The working classes have got no money, they're f---ed. The middle classes are increasingly f---ed, they're debt-ridden, they're precariats. Governments have got no money. They're just used to borrow on behalf of citizens,' he says. 'If you want to preserve capitalism, you have to spread the wealth. If you can't, there is no capitalism. There is corporate capitalism but there's no market society. There's no free market. There's no social mobility.'
Keir Starmer is Welsh's local MP but he is no great fan. 'They're all a bunch of f---ing w---ers. Everyone, all of them. Everybody that is involved, right across the political spectrum.'
By Welsh's telling, social democracy and free-market economics have been abandoned in favour of neoliberalism, and leaves humanity on the precipice. 'Thatcher's property-owning democracy soon became this mergers-and-acquisitions culture, the building of the big corporations and the taking over governments through the lobbying system,' he says. 'She built a communistic corporate state, basically. And when you have that, you've lost social democracy, you've lost a free market... We don't have that kind of opportunity in society, the genuine aspiration and wealth creation in society.'
For many, especially young people, old class politics has been replaced by identity politics. 'We've got the danger of wars, plagues, floods, famines, existential threats, shortages. What can we control? We can control this identity,' he says.
'And then you get the most rapacious elements of capitalism that come along: the medicalisation of life. They'll come along and say you've got depression and anxiety, let's just cut off your d--- and see what happens, or cut off your t---s and give you this medicine and everything will be fine. And then down the line, it's not fine.'
The trans debate is one that most authors would choose to swerve – but then Welsh is not most authors. Men in Love includes a scene when Begbie, Welsh's most violent lunatic, gets incensed when he thinks that some women are actually trans; it comes a couple of years after he published The Long Knives, a crime novel that also features a transgender storyline.
Welsh insists that he is not 'sceptical' of the trans movement, then tees off. 'The word 'trans' is so unhelpful. You've got transsexual people – body dysmorphic people – who are really trying to find a way in this world, and it's a f---ing horrible, challenging, nasty world for them, and they're really working hard at it,' he says. 'And that has been hijacked by a bunch of transvestites, basically; a bunch of narcissistic men who feel sexy wearing women's clothes, and they want to f---ing get their d--- and have a w--- wearing a woman's dress and all that, and then impose that term onto it.
'Then you've got the confused, exploited f---ing teenagers who have been manipulated by the medical opportunists. And all this is being enabled by the gender ideologists. , who are these f---ing weird, freaky descendants of the Paedophile Information Exchange, these weirdos who are trying to create this f---ing ideological matrix to enable all this chaos,' he says, properly on a roll now. 'If I was a trans person, a genuine transsexual person, who was having this struggle I would really be resentful of the way that movement's being hijacked by these narcissists.'
Then there are the likes of Andrew Tate, and their disproportionate influence on alienated young men online. Welsh says the creed of Tate and his ilk – aggressive masculinity and misogyny mixed with conspiracism – is much more appealing to such men than 'some f---ing liberal t--- saying 'You're a scumbag, you're sexist, you're misogynistic, you're a useless piece of s---. Aren't you brainless? Shouldn't you f--- off?' What do you think a young person – a young white guy living at home in his bedroom, w---ing himself into f---ing blindness – wants to hear?'
Part of the problem, he believes, is that 'people don't read books. The attention span of people is about maybe two paragraphs… We only start writing again when we start reading again. I think women are just much more clued up emotionally about all this stuff, they're much more clued up culturally. They have different instincts. And they know what the internet is doing to them. And they also see guys, predatory guys on the internet, making a fucking t--- of themselves.'
He proposes a solution: seizing the money of tech moguls such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to cheer everybody – including the oligarchs – up. 'They'll live life: they'll cook a meal, they'll write a poem, they'll go for a walk, and they'll look at trees, and they'll have people around. They'll chat to people, spend a bit of time with people. They'll have a f---ing life. They don't have a life now.'
Welsh, on the other hand, gives the impression of somebody who loves life and has not quite abandoned his hedonistic ways. He co-founded a record label, is releasing an album of disco music (also called Men in Love) as a tie-in with the novel and wrote the lyrics himself. 'It's quite a dark book, so you don't really get the joy of love,' he says. 'Whereas if you have a complimentary album, you can just express the pure joy, the pure rapture of it all.' Welsh plays some of it on his phone, drowning out the music in the pub. It's funky, with catchy hooks and soaring vocals.
He is a rare thing for a novelist: so successful that he can indulge such passions. But it's hard to imagine a publisher releasing something like Trainspotting today. 'You'd probably have to self-publish first and hope that it was recognised and picked up,' Welsh says. 'Nobody's going to publish something like that.'
Now, we are moving into a 'post-culture society', according to Welsh. 'My theory is, if you became big in the last millennium, in the analogue culture, it kind of ossified. So Trainspotting is a bit like The Dark Side of the Moon now: you're ossified in that culture, and it becomes something that people have to read, like a rite-of-passage book,' he says. 'Which is great for me, but it's s--- for a vibrant ongoing culture. You have these things that are just there all the time, and everything else now is created to be disposable.'
Another constant refrain in today's publishing world is that there are not enough young male novelists. 'It's a chicken-and-egg thing,' he says. 'Men have got to read more… They've got to stop f---ing gaming, spending so much time online, and start reading books again.'
'Preferably mine,' he says. 'But anybody's really.'
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Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Beloved fashion brand 'to return to the high street' after closing all of its 46 UK stores
One of Britain's most beloved fashion brands is reportedly set to make a dramatic high street comeback. Ted Baker, once a retail juggernaut, financially imploded last year and shut all of its 46 remaining UK stores. It came after the firm behind company's British shops, No Ordinary Designer Label (NODL), fell into administration in March last year, with administrators closing 15 shops and cutting 245 jobs. However, reports suggest Ted Baker could now make a triumphant return in a matter of months. The fashion house relaunched its website in November 2024. And now, according to The Sun, the retailer is eyeing up a physical return to the high street - with a new store opening in London in early 2026. Exact details of the potential bounce back have not yet been revealed. MailOnline has contacted Ted Baker for comment. Ted Baker started as a menswear brand in 1988. At the height of its fashion powers it had 550 shops and concessions worldwide. Its smart, boutique-style shops, often in pretty Victorian streets rather than huge malls, attracted shoppers who wanted mid-market stylish attire that was a cut above the likes of TopShop, Oasis and River Island. It was founded by Ray Kelvin - who famously quit in 2019 after being accused of enforcing a 'hugging' culture at the company. North Londoner Kelvin had started working in his uncle's Enfield menswear shop aged 11 and gone on to found the Ted Baker brand after success with a men's shirts shop in Glasgow. The range of shirts in his Scottish city store - in every colour of the rainbow - became a huge hit in the 'acid house' era of the 1990s, as clubbers wanted to stand out under the strobe lights. 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However, industry sources have said there is resistance to the plan, with insiders accusing River Island of expanding too much. 'This is family-run, they've just overstretched, and it's unfair that the landlords will struggle because they haven't maintained their relevance,' one landlord told the Telegraph.


The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Dame Cleo Laine obituary
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Even late in her career, Laine's remarkable range, theatrical awareness of contrast and drama, sensitivity to melody and mood, and astute choice of high-class songs, prevented her from ever sounding remotely dated. Whether in coolly countermelodic duets with her husband John Dankworth, the alto saxophonist, in flat-out exercises in zigzagging scat or stomping swing, or in spacey moods of poignant reflectiveness, Laine was never less than the classiest of acts. In 1997, she and Dankworth were, fittingly, given a Royal Albert Hall Prom concert in honour of their joint 70th birthdays. As long-time stars of a usually low-profile British jazz scene, they brought together the worlds of dinner-jacket arts and unruly jazz. They helped put British jazz on the map, encouraged music education, smuggled jazz into the sensibilities of listeners who had thought they loathed it, and generally added a splash of style and confidence to a sometimes shadowy and defensive subculture. Laine's onstage glamour would give way to a far more worldly and down-to-earth magnetism as soon as the spotlight was off. A candid and personable woman, she impressed those who met her with her easygoing alertness, unexpectedly small stature for those who had previously only encountered her on a concert stage, and penetrating green eyes framed by dark curls. She was also – in the age of the ubiquitous psychotherapist – mock-guilty about her lightness of spirit, saying simply: 'I'm not a very neurotic person.' This realism allowed her to consider both her talents and her shortcomings with neither self-importance nor guilt. She would occasionally ponder whether two parents spending a lifetime on the road was not textbook childcare by some standards, but pointed out the independence and self-reliance of her children with Dankworth – their son, Alec, became a successful double-bassist and bandleader, and daughter, Jacqui, a vocalist, actor and songwriter with much of her mother's canny timing, emotional subtlety, and inclusiveness of taste. Laine was born in Southall, west London, one of three children of a Jamaican father, Alexander Campbell, and an English mother, Minnie Bullock, who took in lodgers. Raised as Clementina Campbell (the fact that her birth had been registered under her mother's name, before her parents married, did not emerge until she applied for a passport at 26, by which time she was performing as Cleo Laine), she showed early singing talent and was encouraged by her mother to take singing and dancing lessons. 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In her mid-20s Laine began seriously to apply herself to singing. She had started out in pubs ('useful training for improvisation' she would ruefully recall) and eventually auditioned for the successful British modern jazz band led by Dankworth. Though she was a raw unknown, Dankworth and his musicians recognised her promise. 'I was amazed they liked me,' Laine told the Guardian in 1997. 'I had begun to think auditions were my hobby, I'd been rejected on dozens of them, and talent competitions too.' But Dankworth was after somebody different, and Laine was unusual as a rich-toned contralto. She listened closely to Billie Holiday for her presence and sense of drama, Fitzgerald for the thought processes and technique that allowed her to improvise so exuberantly, and Sarah Vaughan for her operatic range. The mature Laine was to exhibit all these qualities. She toured the UK extensively with the Dankworth band in the mid-50s. She divorced Langridge in 1957 and the following year married Dankworth, and shared the care of her first son, Stuart – by then 13 and sometimes a traveller with her on the road – with her mother and sister. She accompanied Dankworth to the US in 1959 for his appearance at the Newport jazz festival, and sang with the band at Birdland in New York on the same trip. She also began to read widely, and developed an enthusiasm for poetry – particularly that of ee cummings, one of whose pieces she was to record as a song. She also started to act and was initially confined to Caribbean roles, but her skill bloomed, and she was to regard her appearances at the Edinburgh festival in the 60s and in A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1967, as high points. But there were many others: Flesh to a Tiger, directed by Tony Richardson at the Royal Court theatre in 1958, the English musical Valmouth, the title role in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, plus musical appearances in Show Boat, Colette, The Seven Deadly Sins, A Little Night Music and The Merry Widow. She also originated the role of Princess Puffer (and won several awards and nominations for it) in the Broadway hit musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood in 1985. She took on parts as diverse as the voice of God in the BBC Proms' production of Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde (1990) and the Witch in Stephen Sondheim's Los Angeles production of Into the Woods (1988). She recorded prolifically in the 60s, on show-song and soundtrack projects (Dankworth was an in-demand movie composer at the time) and straight jazz albums with guests including the British sax virtuoso Tubby Hayes and her vocalist contemporary Annie Ross, and in that decade she was also a frequent guest on the British TV satire That Was the Week That Was. Dankworth, meanwhile, had begun exploring jazz variations on non-jazz traditions in his own music, and broke through to a new public with arrangements of Shakespeare sonnets – Shakespeare and All That Jazz (1964), which won widespread acclaim and a five-star accolade in the US magazine DownBeat. Laine took to them eagerly – on slow pieces such as O Mistress Mine and Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day, she showed a remarkable ability to make the quietest sounds ring like tiny bells, and then be enveloped in a wash of resonant low notes. Classical audiences, too, were now beginning to wake up to Laine's skilful control, rich tones and spontaneous jazz sensibility. She was Julie in the spectacularly successful 1971 London production of Jerome Kern's Show Boat, made an acclaimed New York debut in 1972 and the first of her Carnegie Hall appearances (her Live at Carnegie Hall album from 1974 brought her a first Grammy nomination), and further expanded her palette in recording Arnold Schoenberg's poetry-cycle Pierrot Lunaire, which was nominated for a classical Grammy. Despite an increasingly frenetic working life, she and Dankworth also oversaw the development of their Buckinghamshire home at Wavendon as a working theatre. Over the next decades, Laine collaborated with the flautist James Galway (1980) and classical guitarist John Williams (1984), contributed to Michael Tilson Thomas's LSO series The Gershwin Years (1987), and a tribute to female songwriters including Joni Mitchell and Holiday (Woman to Woman, 1989). Her bluesily soulful encounter with Ray Charles (Porgy and Bess, 1976) was a highlight, as was a hip and swinging meeting with Mel Tormé (Nothing Without You, 1992). Laine also appeared alongside Frank Sinatra during a week of concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in 1992. Following her autobiography, Cleo (1994), Laine also published You Can Sing If You Want To (1997) – an informal guide to learning to use the voice freely and confidently as an instrument. The Dankworths slowed down only marginally in their 70s – their concerts worldwide still continued to sell out – and when Laine hit 80 in 2007 (Dankworth's 80th having preceded hers by a month), she performed a series of UK shows, including a reunion of the John Dankworth Sextet that had set her stardom in motion. A four-disc box set, I Hear Music, was released documenting the pair's work from 1944 to 2005. Dankworth's health declined late in 2009, on a US tour that had to be curtailed. He died on the morning of 10 February 2010. He and Laine, plus a glitzy cast of guests, had been due to play at Wavendon that night, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Stables theatre. Impelled by the conviction that Dankworth would have wanted the celebration to go on, Laine went home from the hospital, played the gig, and broke the news of his death to a stunned audience only at the close. She continued to perform for some years, frequently with a Dankworth rhythm section including Alec on bass and the pianist John Horler, thus demonstrating, as at the Cheltenham jazz festival in 2011, that Laine could still deliver a classic jazz song such as Duke Ellington's Creole Love Call with a freshness not far away from Adelaide Hall's 1920s version of the original. Laine and Dankworth foresaw the contemporary developments that have led to the growing embrace of jazz innovation by audiences coming from the European art-music tradition, from western pop, or from cultures unrelated to either. Laine would readily agree that grand opera at its best was 'glorious … but Louis Armstrong is glorious, too, and operatic in his own way'. For her musicianship, and for that breadth of view, she acquired a raft of accolades and prizes, and in 1997 she was made a dame. Her achievements were a rich blend of the creative journey and the crusade, qualities of a musical life that she and Dankworth conducted with the lightest of touches. Despite all the globetrotting, the jet-lag and the impossible schedules, it seemed more fun to them than working. Stuart died in 2019. Laine is survived by Alec and Jacqui. Cleo Laine (Clementine Dinah Bullock), singer and actor, born 27 October 1927; died 24 July 2025


The Sun
an hour ago
- The Sun
MAFS UK sign up stunning blonde with three ITV soap star pals
MARRIED At First Sight has cast a super-glam blonde business consultant for its new series. Leah Tyrer is set to be one of the brides for the upcoming show, which was shot earlier this year and will air in the autumn. 4 4 A source told The Sun: 'Leah is sure to be one of the most talked about brides this year. "She's a fun party girl and regularly shows off her toned body in bikini snaps from her luxury holidays on social media. "She's also pals with several ITV soap stars. Former Emmerdale star Charley Webb regularly comments on her snaps and has branded her 'prettiest' on one picture. "She also counts former Corrie stars Helen Flanagan and Kimberly Hart-Simpson amongst her followers, so she's already well-connected before she's even made her TV debut.' The bride-to-be, who turned 30 this year, is based in Edinburgh. Along with Leah, another fellow bride has been revealed as a stunning dental practice manager. Brunette Leisha Lightbody was the first to sign up for the E4 series. Leisha juggles her job as a dental practice manager with marketing and social media roles. She can often be seen showcasing her lavish getaways and glam lifestyle on Instagram and TikTok. The raven-haired beauty will soon be switching vacations for vows during Married At First Sight filming, which will see her say I Do to a complete stranger. First MAFS UK 2025 bride revealed as stunning dental practice manager months before new series hits screens The hit E4 show has revealed when the new series will start filming, as well as how you can apply to be on the next show. Though no official start date for the 2025 season has been revealed, MAFS UK will likely hit our screens in the coming months. It is estimated that it will make a welcome comeback in the middle of September. Elsewhere, a former MAFS UK star has given birth to her first child and revealed its adorable name and a sweet snap. Dental hygienist Jess Potter, 33, who shot to fame on the E4 show in 2022, shared the happy news with her fans on Wednesday. She has given birth to her first child with fiance TJ O'Reilly. The reality star previously shared her pregnancy journey with fans having had three failed stages of IVF and four heartbreaking losses. To apply for MAFS UK 2026, click here. The Sun has contacted a rep for C4 for comment. 4