For the past six series, Keith Lemon has been leading the nation on a root around some of the country’s biggest celebs’ houses, as the host of ‘Through The Keyhole’.
Ahead of Friday night’s Christmas special, HuffPost UK spoke to the always-outrageous TV presenter about his most memorable, funniest and, at times, most shocking moments since he began presenting the ITV show.
Here are the 10 juiciest things he revealed...
1. Six series in, the show hasn’t been without its mishaps over the years
We’ve broken loads of shit, yeah. Loads of stuff. The guiltiest I’ve felt, we did Su Pollard, and the camera lights were leaning against her curtain, and ended up setting her curtains on fire, and we had to buy her some new curtains.
And also, Denise Welch. She had a strange office in her basement, and the ceiling was very low, and I stood up and my head went through the ceiling.
It were made up of these weird tiles, so we replaced the tiles with a leopard print tile, but her husband wasn’t happy, he wanted a normal one. I thought a bit of leopard print would have looked nice.
2. Kerry Katona’s home still holds the award for the most alarming discovery
The weirdest thing we’ve found, still to this day, is probably Kerry Katona from the pilot. I found a brown paper bag with a Dracula mask and a vibrator in it. That’s quite weird – not the vibrator, but the Dracula mask and a vibrator.
3. The only thing they won’t show is if a celeb has been a bit light on the cleaning
The only time I’m embarrassed for them is if the house isn’t clean… and I’ll be honest with you. They’re not all clean, and if some of them are a bit dirty, we can’t go “ugh, look at that”, you can’t do that, because it’s Saturday night, it’s aspirational, and you don’t want to say somebody’s house is a pigsty, do you? You don’t wanna do that.
Except we did it with Katie Price, we talked about her swimming pool, and made out that I was jealous because she owned her own swamp. “Living the dream, you’ve got your own swamp! It’s like being in Florida!”.
4. One celebrity’s dirty bedding definitely left an impression on Keith
I don’t know if it’s this series – I won’t name the person – but they only had one pillow on their bed. And I thought that was weird. Just one singular pillow! If you live by yourself, you still have two pillows on the bed, don’t you? It was weird.
Maybe that person had had a bit of fun with themselves, and spilled that fun on the other pillow, because there was a bit of fun on the duvet. And I said, “the dirty pig, your duvet’s covered in fun”. *laughs* You’d just buy a new duvet with ‘Through The Keyhole’ coming round. The least you would do is flip it over.
5. Keith is yet to steal anything from a celeb’s home but he does have a habit of *sigh* leaving something behind
I’ve never nicked anything. I do always leave my brown calling card, I always go for a poo in their toilet, and back in the day I used to get naked and get into their beds and send it to my mates and say ‘whose house do you think I’m in?’.
And what’s different about this series is that we’re not revealing whose house I’m in, so the viewers can play along at home. People used to say ‘you keep spoiling whose house it is’, yeah, because we have to stick to the original format. Well, for some reason, we don’t now, so we can not show whose house it is, so you can guess along. So that’s fun.
6. And on that note, guessing the celebrities hasn’t always been easy for the guest panellists
What’s terrible is, when [the panellist] know whose house it is, but they can’t remember the person’s name. We had Neil Morrissey on one series, and I can’t remember who was on the panel, but they said, ‘I know whose house it is, but I can’t remember his name, even though I was with him about a month ago’. So that was embarrassing.
7. Rylan’s house is the one that Keith has been most surprised by over the years
If I’m honest, I was quite surprised at Rylan’s house. I don’t know what series it was, but Rylan was so really new to showbiz, and I thought, ‘he’s done well for himself, look at the size of his gaff!’. I said, ‘have you got a side business, do you do importing and exporting of toilet rolls or something? Why’s your house so big, so quickly?’.
8. Now a full-on expert in celebrity interiors, Keith has picked up on the trends, including a brand new one
The next series, the new fad I’ve noticed a lot of is dreamcatchers. In the past it was Buddhas. Buddhas everywhere, everyone who’s a celebrity has a Buddha. They’re all Buddhists, but they’re not Buddhists, but they say they’re Buddhists, but they aren’t Buddhists. A lot of Buddhas everywhere. But this series I’ve seen a lot of dreamcatchers, so they must be very in vogue at the moment.
And I’m not into positive messages around the house. Just words in the bathroom that says ‘bathroom’, stuff like that. Or “love”. Or “in this family, we do this, and we do this”. Or “dream, believe, achieve”, all that nonsense. I’m not knocking someone for having that, that’s up to them but I’m not into that, and there’s a lot of that. Positive slogans and stuff.
I just think it’s all a bit daft, I think, ‘if you put negative slogans in their house, will they have a shit life?’. I don’t think so. A sign on their bedroom wall saying ‘you’ll have a terrible night’s sleep’, and then, ’oh, I couldn’t sleep last night, ‘cause of that sign’. I think we might have done that, you know? Left a negative message, ’have a shit day’, because we were laughing so hard at all the shit messages. I can’t remember who, though. I can’t remember anything!
9. He’s already got big ideas for future episodes...
What we should do is perhaps do a ouija board in their bedroom, and let their house become haunted, so they have to move. That might be fun.
Let’s get an evil spirit from the ouija board to haunt ’em, and then just leave. Bye! Good luck!
10. ...And he’s aiming high when it comes to guests
What happens is, the producers give me a long list of names, and I just tick or cross, and then they just ask everyone. And there is a panic when you get to series 6 where you go ‘is anyone going to let us in their house in series 6’, but what happens is, new celebrities are invented every year, and old celebrities sell their houses, and move to different houses in the country, so we do have access to those houses.
I always tick Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt, anyone of that calibre, I always tick. And we end up with people not of that calibre. But I still think they’re very good houses.
‘Through The Christmas Keyhole’ airs on Friday at 9pm on ITV, with the rest of the new series to follow in January.