Quadruple amputee enters the Big Brother house

Charlotte Nott has never let anything hold her back.

The student, from Oxford, is a quadruple amputee, having lost the lower parts of her arms and legs to meningitis when she was just two years old.

Now 18, Charlotte is a contestant in the latest series of Big Brother, something she has dreamed about for most of her life.

Her dad, Alex, told BBC Radio Oxford he was anxious about her appearance on the show, but said there had never been much point telling his daughter not to do something she had her sights on.

That resilience was on full display within seconds of Charlotte's arrival on the show.

During the launch, her shoe broke as she stepped out to be introduced, and she had to remove her prosthetic legs on stage before entering the house.

"Maybe it was my fate to walk in with no legs," she told the diary room. "Maybe that was just what was meant to happen."

She added that she was used to going without her prosthetics at home.

"When I'm at home, I have my legs off all the time," she said. "When I'm cooking, I have my legs off. I like to be four foot. I like to be tiny, like a little tiny doll."

Alex said the moment had summed up his daughter's unstoppable nature perfectly.

Charlotte applied for the show earlier this year - the first time she had been old enough to enter - and made it through a process her dad said involved around 50,000 applicants.

"She's wanted to go in there since she was about five or six," he said. "I think she used to watch it religiously with her mum."

Charlotte had applied without telling her dad and had already completed several interviews with producers before he found out.

He admitted he had struggled to come to terms with her decision to apply.

"I thought she was on a wind-up to start with," he said. "She was dead serious. I've been in bits for about three months."

But Alex said there was little point trying to stand in her way.

"You try telling someone like Charlotte that she's not allowed to do something," he said.

"We've gone her whole life trying to tell her that she can't do stuff, and she's just taken on that mantle."

Since she turned 16, he said she had taken charge of every decision relating to her own care and prosthetics.

Alex said his daughter had the resilience to handle whatever reaction she received from the public.

"Every day is a struggle for her, more than for anybody else," he said. "But she's got skin as thick as a rhino's. I take my hat off to her."

Charlotte said she expected viewers watching her around the clock to be surprised by how ordinary her daily life actually was.

"People are surprised at anything I do, even normal things like cooking, doing my makeup, getting dressed," she said. "They're probably going to be surprised at the most normal things for me."

Asked what she would do with the prize money if she won, Charlotte said her prosthetic legs cost around £25,000 each.

"I probably would put a lot of it into savings," she said. "My prosthetic legs are about £25,000 per leg, so probably put half in savings and then the other half... just go on a nice holiday, just kind of spend it."

Caroline Hughes, senior support services Manager for Meningitis Research Foundation, said the long term consequences of the disease "remain widely misunderstood".

"Every day, we support people navigating the physical, emotional and practical challenges that can follow a meningitis diagnosis," she said.

"That's why it is so powerful to see people like Charlotte sharing their experience on a platform like Big Brother.

"By speaking so openly about her story, she is helping bring greater understanding of the long-term impact meningitis can have, while also enabling others affected by the disease to feel seen, heard and less alone."

The 23rd series of Big Brother began on 13 September and will last 54 days, making it the longest series since 2017.

ITV said the series had been "reimagined as a house of surprises" and viewers could expect "ambitious tasks, high-stakes nominations and dramatic live evictions".