You can take Big Brother off the telly, but you can't take the years of presenting Big Brother away from Emma Willis.
That's the lesson that Emma herself learned during the live finale of her new show The Circle on Friday night (October 18). Unfortunately, she slipped up in front of a national TV audience.
Remember a few weeks back when Emma told off blocked player Sy the farmer on one of the live shows? The presenter had some egg on her own face when she had an unfortunate flashback.
Related: The Circle's eliminated player Busayo responds to trolling she received online
While she was interviewing Ella May, Emma was explaining to viewers about how Ella had only just been let out of The Circle apartment complex for the first time since her blocking.
"When you first entered the house," she said, before correcting herself: "Not the house! The apartment."
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As the audience and Ella started chuckling at her accidental reference to the Big Brother house, Emma herself smiled and declared: "Oh, come on!"
Related: What the reaction to The Circle's Busayo says about racism and TV
Big Brother fans appreciated the shout-out (even if it wasn't the first time Emma accidentally slipped up and referenced 'the house' in the series):
Emma's mistake was particularly funny since she went to great pains to insist Big Brother was actually nothing like The Circle.
"I know there's this kind suggestion it is just a replacement for Big Brother for me but I view it quite differently," she recently said. "The thing with Big Brother is that for me, I always viewed it with the purist mentality, it was a social experiment. That is always how I watched Big Brother. But this, I very much watch it as a game.
"I hated Big Brother being compared to a game but this is clearly a game with the interaction of people, how they'll react in certain scenarios and then seeing who is going to be themselves and who is going to play it to try and be the most popular and win that money."
The Circle has aired its second series on Channel 4.
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Justin is a freelance entertainment journalist and writer. He first joined Digital Spy as a freelance entertainment reporter in 2010 and also worked as a sub-editor for the brand, serving as Night News Editor from 2016 to 2024. Over more than a decade, Justin has covered numerous major entertainment events from the US and has interviewed a wide-ranging group of public figures, from comedian Steve Coogan to icons from the Star Trek universe, cast members from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and reality stars from numerous Real Housewives cities and the Below Deck franchise. Justin has also been on the ground to cover major pop culture events like the Star Wars Celebration and the D23 Expo. He's written for titles across the Hearst network, plus the likes of CBR and Us Weekly.
