‘I was handcuffed to a millionaire and asked him to put his pants on’

Tilly runs her own cleaning company, works in a pub and runs a homeless charity. Anthony is a millionaire who hasn’t cleaned a toilet since 1975. If they can stand to be handcuffed to each other for 10 days straight, they could split £100,000 between them.

Sounds easy? It’s not – and it’s the premise of Channel 4’s timely new social experiment, Handcuffed, hosted by Jonahtan Ross, exploring whether common ground can be found in an increasingly broken Britain.

Tilly and Anthony are two of 18 brave strangers putting their patience and tolerance to the test. Elsewhere, a staunch feminist is tethered to an alpha male, a heterosexual gay porn star is bound to a ‘prude’ homemaker, and a lefty Green councillor is chained to a Farageophile.

They are completely inseparable the entire time. They eat together, sleep together, even shower and use the toilet together. It’s as intimate as you can possibly get with a total stranger. But none of that fazed Tilly quite as much as her own bodily functions.

‘I was very panicky about farting, my farts are rotten. I’ve got really bad IBS, honestly, and I’d been trumping all day in this man’s house,’ Tilly tells Metro of her biggest concerns throughout the process.

‘That was something that worried me, and also the sleeping. The first two nights we stayed at Anthony’s, and he was sleeping with dogs in the bed, he was snoring so much and I was boiling hot.

‘He didn’t have any underwear on at one point, so I had to tell him, “You need to put some pants on.”’

Tilly assures me Anthony did oblige to her request, but they swiftly had to learn to be completely comfortable with each other naked. On their first morning together, after sweating uncomfortably in their shared bed during a record-hot summer, they had to shower side by side.

‘We just got on with it on our second day,’ Tilly says. ‘Others wore blindfolds, got screens up. On the flip side, I was having a wee and I said to Anthony, “do you mind turning around? Your face is literally in my fanny.”

‘I lucked out because Anthony’s gay. I wouldn’t have been so free with my body with a straight man.’

Getting over the intimacy of essentially sharing a body with another person is one thing; tolerating them at their best and worst is another.

‘Anthony can talk for f**king England,’ says Tilly, clearly still exasperated by the memory of it.

She tells me that she’s an alcoholic and former drug taker and has now been sober for seven years.

‘He never asked me about that,’ she says. ‘I pulled him up on it, and then he sort of made the whole conversation about himself. It made me realise you can’t expect everybody to be like you or treat you the way you treat them.’

Anthony and Tilly did not walk into life on the same playing field – a fact Anthony couldn’t quite grasp. He can’t comprehend that Tilly can’t imagine a day when she will buy her own property, planning to spend her share of the prize money – should they win – on paying a year’s rent on a London flat upfront. He, admirably, wants to use the money to pay for his mother’s care home bills – ‘even if he can afford it himself,’ Tilly laughs.

‘He just thinks everything comes really easily to people and it doesn’t, sadly,’ she says.

‘Until he came and saw the work that at my homeless charity, saw how people actually live, he was taken quite aback. I probably took for granted how easily it comes to me to speak to people, and it doesn’t come that easily to him, especially people that aren’t on his level.

‘We’ve been out since and I remember him saying to me, “I’ve not bought any new clothes since we’ve done the experiment because I just think about that man hanging up his clothes in the trees and how much it hurt me.” I thought, “fair play to you. I don’t know if happy is the right word, but I felt like mission accomplished.”’

Tilly and Anthony weren’t on a level playing field during the experiment either. £50,000 is significantly more impactful for Tilly than for Anthony; the prospect of losing it when it’s so close to her grasp is absolutely petrifying when, for Anthony, he could likely move on without his life, home or future being even slightly dented.

How did it feel knowing her fate rested in the hands of a millionaire who just didn’t need £50,000?

‘I was very honest from the start that I was desperate for the money,’ she says. ‘I wanted to win that money so much to the point where I didn’t really want to think about it too much, because if you imagine things and then it doesn’t happen, then how heartbroken are you going to be? Anthony knew that the prize money meant more to me than it did to him but because of our relationship and how he feels towards me, that pushed him to make us want to win even more.’

Tilly matter-of-factly admits she’s sure Anthony probably learned more from her during the experiment, and after watching the first two episodes, I’d have to agree. But she didn’t walk away without taking home some valuable lessons from him too.

She says: ’It made me think not to be so judgmental. Don’t think every rich, middle class, posh person is a ct. It’s easy to be envious towards somebody that’s born with a silver spoon up their ae.

‘But it probably accentuated my beliefs more than anything. You’re either very rich or you’re very poor and there are massive divides in the country.

‘I saw that firsthand knocking about with someone with 50 or 60 Rolls Royces, a car collection that is worth millions when on a Wednesday night, I’m feeding over 100 people because they can’t afford to eat. That’s really gross and it really just put it into perspective, and made me think that the work that me and my mates do is well needed so to never stop doing it until you die.’

Handcuffed airs Monday at 9pm on Channel 4.

Got a story?

If you’ve got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the Metro.co.uk entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@metro.co.uk, calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we’d love to hear from you.

MORE: How ‘biggest WWE star of all time’ is preparing for comeback match after 11 years

MORE: ‘I’m an expert on bisexuality – Benedict Bridgerton’s queerness pays tribute to history’

MORE: Kaley Cuoco: ‘My tense Amazon Prime thriller unlocked a new fear in me’