What do you wear when you slide into bed with a man for the first time when you’ve only just met him, know nothing about him – ‘not even how he takes his coffee’ – yet married him that day?
Carla Kyle is one of the few women who can answer that question. Like much of the story of her first marriage, it’s complicated.
‘I didn’t wear a flannelette nightie, up to here,’ she says, gesturing to her neck. ‘But nor was I going to be wearing something silky. I didn’t know him! In the end, I wore my jammies.’
Modern TV audiences might think that the phenomenon of weddings between strangers in the name of entertainment started with Married At First Sight (MAFS), which first aired in the UK in 2015. But actually there was a precursor – and Carla has the divorce papers to prove it.
Back in 1999, she was 23 years old when she found herself alone with a stranger in a luxury hotel room in Birmingham on her wedding night after winning a radio competition. As Carla says, ‘it was a different age’.
At the time, reality TV was still a twinkle in media executives’ eyes – even Big Brother wouldn’t happen for another year. The radio contest felt like a great wheeze, a fun stunt. The wedding certificate was real, though, as was the double bed Carla agreed to get into with her new husband.
Did it occur to her, then, or now, that she had placed herself in great danger?
‘Absolutely not then. Back then, I thought it was a laugh. Getting married to a stranger was something I did because I was bored and because my friend Joanna told me to. What harm could become of it?’
‘Back then, I thought it was a laugh. Getting married to a stranger was something I did because I was bored and because my friend Joanna told me to,’ says Carla Kyle
Back in 1999, she was 23 years old when she found herself alone with a stranger in a luxury hotel room in Birmingham on her wedding night after winning a radio competition
Well… today she knows.
‘Recently, I watched that Panorama show, and I thought, “This is what harm could have been done”.’
The programme she is referring to was the BBC investigation that exposed serious allegations of rape, domestic violence and sexual misconduct on Channel 4’s Married At First Sight. The claims are denied by the men involved, but the show has been taken off air while a police investigation is carried out.
Having watched the Panorama programme, Carla can see now what a potentially dangerous situation she’d been placed in.
It’s why, having previously refused to talk about her experience of being the first bride in Britain to marry a stranger for entertainment, she has finally broken her silence after 27 years.
‘The man they paired me up with – who was a complete gentleman – could have been a rapist, or an abuser, because there were no checks at all in those days,’ she says. ‘We were matched up partly on the basis of astrology charts! Can you imagine? Anything could have happened.’
Carla, now a 50-year-old mother of three, shudders – both at the naivety of youth, and at how much things have changed for those who marry strangers for TV ratings today. Yet even with checks and balances and contracts about duty-of-care supposedly in place, the accusations still arose.
Channel 4 and the production company CPL have strongly denied claims that they failed to act appropriately or that their welfare protocols were inadequate. ‘Those poor girls,’ Carla says of the contestants who aired their allegations on the documentary. People will say, “They knew what they were getting into”, but I bet they didn’t.
‘The man they paired me up with – who was a complete gentleman – could have been a rapist, or an abuser, because there were no checks at all in those days,’ says Carla
She says the Panorama programme made her think, for the first time in forever, about Greg Cordell, the 28-year-old stranger who climbed into the other side of the bed – in his boxer shorts – that night. ‘I haven’t thought much about Greg for 27 years. I haven’t seen him since the day he left… I wouldn’t know him if I walked past him in the street,’ she says.
‘I never had anything bad to say about him, but after watching that programme I thought, “Actually, I’d put you on a pedestal, mate, for the way you treated me”, because he was a complete gentleman. Maybe I did get lucky.’
She shakes her head, wondering how we’ve ended up in a position where she’s belatedly congratulating a man simply for not attacking her. ‘This isn’t about me, and I don’t want it to be. But if this is happening with all the checks in place, I think it’s so sad. I just want to say to those girls, “Run! If you feel you are in any danger just get out.” ’
Since she’s one of the few people in Britain who has been in this position, what would she say to any young woman considering marrying someone she doesn’t know on TV? ‘I’d advise her not to, but at the same time I remember the position my parents were in. I was 23, and they couldn’t stop me.
‘But it’s about choices, and if a woman chooses to do this, it should be her right not to be abused. And you shouldn’t need to write that into a contract, to keep someone safe. Where will it end? Will we have it written into the wedding vows? “Till death us do part, and I promise not to rape you?” ’
For Carla, her first marriage came about after Birmingham radio station BRMB launched a competition where the prize was a wedding, a honeymoon and use of a luxury flat and car for a year. Carla, then a model for Next, was persuaded to enter by her friend – and duly won.
An ITV documentary called Two Strangers And A Wedding was all part of the package.
What a hoopla the whole thing caused. The wedding was roundly criticised by church leaders as ‘a dangerous and immoral experiment’ – as MAFS would also be – and Carla remembers a media scrum as the world’s Press followed the newlyweds to the Bahamas on their honeymoon.
An ITV documentary called Two Strangers And A Wedding was all part of the package (Greg and Carla in 1999)
‘They all wanted to know if the marriage had been consummated. I didn’t even know what the word meant,’ she said. Alas, they didn’t live happily ever after. Greg, a sales manager from Staffordshire, legged it after three months, and, truth be told, she was delighted to see him go.
‘There was never any sexual attraction,’ she remembers, cringing a little. ‘I told the people doing the matchmaking that my “type” was Joey from Friends, or David Beckham. My friend and my sister saw him first, as they took their seats for the ceremony at the Birmingham Hyatt Hotel, and say they were thinking “Carla is not going to be pleased here.” ’
The bride wore a white silk dress and sweeping veil, and was walked down the aisle by her dad – despite his reservations.
There was no frisson, no spark of sexual interest when she saw her groom. Yet they exchanged vows and rings (the latter engraved with the radio station’s logo 96.4BRMB).
Dare we ask if the marriage was ever consummated? Actually, it was, she admits.
‘But certainly not on the first night, and not even on the honeymoon. We did it after about six weeks. I think by that stage we thought, “We might as well”, but I’m sure he was thinking the same as I was. There just wasn’t that attraction. By the end he was actually sleeping on the sofa. He was decent like that.’
What’s astonishing about Carla speaking out today is that she’s always valued her privacy – a desire only strengthened by that experience of being catapulted into the public eye.
While Greg was keen to be part of a media couple – ‘he had a showreel done and wanted to go down that path’ – she shunned the limelight. ‘I was actually a very private person,’ she says. ‘I genuinely hadn’t gone into it for that reason. I also had a good job in Next. I realised I wanted to keep the life I had.’
She can see now how naive she was to think that would be possible: ‘Because there was no precedent, I genuinely had no idea. The difference is that the girls now do. They go into it with their eyes open.’
She finds it incomprehensible that young women still apply for shows like MAFS when they know exactly what is in store – at least in terms of being in that spotlight.
She says that while she ‘won’ the husband, the lovely flat and the Bahamas holiday, there was a price to pay, because she was publicly vilified – and these were the days before social media trolls. ‘People were outraged,’ she remembers. ‘There was a lot of hate. I remember being in a pub and one girl elbowing me and putting a fag out on my designer handbag.’
People were cruel. ‘I was this crazy girl who had married a stranger. I was loose of morals. I dread to think what would have happened had it been today and I had social media to deal with.’
Ironic really, given that she reckons she was actually quite a prudish 23-year-old.
‘I wasn’t a virgin but I’d only had a couple of boyfriends. I wasn’t like that, and my parents had been against me doing it, particularly my dad because it’s a hard thing for a father to see his daughter do something like that.’ After it all collapsed – with the ink not even dry on the divorce papers – she was ushered on to TV to explain why the marriage had failed.
‘We’d had to go on GMTV immediately after the wedding, then again to announce the divorce. I will never forget Eamonn Holmes saying, “Married and divorced at 23. This is a blot on your record, isn’t it?” I thought, “Wow!” ’
Ironically, applying for that competition did lead to love for Carla. Her second husband – the father of her three children – was the presenter Jeremy Kyle, who was working for the Birmingham radio station at the time.
Her second husband – the father of her three children – was the presenter Jeremy Kyle (pictured in 2014)
They divorced after 13 years, and he’s now married to their former nanny – a whole other subject, which she won’t get into, ‘to protect my children’.
But, she says, ‘at least we met in the normal way by chatting, having a laugh, getting to know someone so by the time you go to bed with them you know how they take their coffee.’
She says several times that she feels ‘about 70’ now, but she really does sound like the old, wise woman when she talks about reality TV, and how things have changed since those days ‘when we didn’t know any better’.
‘When you think about it, the girls who are going on MAFS and Love Island have grown up with this. Everything is so sexualised now. Those young women who are in their 20s now were only 14 when MAFS started. It’s their normal to meet someone online, to chat to them on TikTok. It’s now normal not to meet someone in the normal way, if that makes sense.’
She also blames the ‘manosphere’ culture for its influence on young men, giving some a sense of entitlement that nice-guy Greg simply didn’t have.
‘At the same time, you have young men applying for these shows… who follow these influencers who say women should be treated in a certain way.’
Carla keeps her life very private these days. She works as a personal stylist and while she has a social media account, the settings are private. She says she would support a social media ban for under-16s.
Does she have any advice for how the makers of MAFS can protect future contestants?
‘I do wonder if an idea would be to vet all the contestants more, to go to previous partners and say “What was your experience of this person? Were there any hints of coercive control?”’
What of Greg, the unexpected hero of this piece? She has no idea what has happened to him in the years since, but has she wondered?
‘No, but then I didn’t wonder what he was doing when I was married to him,’ she says, which kind of says it all.
