If there's one thing that the sixteen contestants in this year's Big Brother won't want to hear it's this - after a few months and maybe years of minor celebrity they will sink back into obscurity, perhaps a little better off.
But there are two exceptions to this rule - the late Jade Goody from BB5, who when she died earlier this year had amassed an £8m fortune, and the original Big Brother winner Craig Phillips who recently revealed he's made £5 million.
Craig, who before BB was a builder by trade, was always an improbable winner; at heart he's a nice bloke, relatively ordinary, stable and very different to the squealing freaks that Big Brother had had to pick out for this year's 24-hour, three-month summer TV circus.
And unlike Jade, who made her money opening supermarkets, promoting her perfume and publishing an autobiography, much of Craig's wealth is not derived from his BB fame or the £70,000 prize money (which he gave away after winning to a charity) but instead from a burgeoning property empire based in his home city Liverpool.
"Not bad for a lad who left school at 15 without a bean," he told a newspaper recently. "Big Brother gave me a springboard and a confidence I could never dream of. I've been dead lucky."
Craig recently revealed that he now owns 20 rental properties in the city's suburbs, and that he is currently half-way through building a new block of luxury flats. Also, he said he was glad not to have invested in Liverpool's city centre, where the property market is in freefall as apartment block after apartment block goes up while buyers are thin on the ground.
