What's it like to be hypnotised into falling madly in love with Phillip Schofield?
Kate, 30, tells us about being enraptured by the TV presenter on hypnotic new game show You're Back in the Room...
Relax. Make sure you're comfortable and look into my eyes (or actually, at this screen...). You will now read this article...
This Saturday, a new hypnotism game show starts on ITV, fronted by Phillip Schofield, in which a team of five strangers take on apparently simple challenges to win money – the catch is that each of these contestants have been hypnotised by mentalist Keith Barry so that seemingly simple tasks are suddenly very tricky indeed.
RadioTimes.com spoke to contestant Kate, a 30-year old polo player and polo club manager who appears in the first episode of the show. Here's her account of being hypnotised into believing she was head-over-heels in love with Schofe...
"I was hypnotised to believe I was madly in love with Phillip Schofield and that he was going to propose to me.
"I was more in love with the poor man than you can imagine and I didn’t even bother answering half the questions he asked me and I was uninterested in winning the cash prize.
"I honestly thought that we were going to get married and there was nothing that was going to stand in my way.
"I was given different triggers like being told I would flirt with Phillip Schofield in the most extravagant way. So you’ll see on the show that I tend to gurn an awful lot, and I kind of lift my leg in a quirky way or in a flirtatious way to win him over. Schoefield got down on one knee and proposed to me. He honestly led me to believe he was in love with me and he was going to marry me.
"All these mannerisms I can honestly say I wouldn’t perform in real life, I'm not that sort of character.
"I went on the show because I had a random telephone call on a Friday afternoon from a producer who invited me to London to have some auditions. I’m not the type of person to go on a show, let alone a hypnotist show, but I thought I’d give it a try. We had auditions to test us to see how susceptible we were to hypnosis.
"We were all hypnotised before the show because Keith Barry can’t hypnotise us in front of people in case he hypnotises the audience.
"The bell stopped all of our triggers, that would make us sit back in our chairs and then Keith Barry would remove the triggers he’d put into us. Once he’d removed the triggers we were back to being normal.
"Once the task was over and I’d been un-hypnotised I remembered it as a dream. You know when you wake up and you think, did that really happen? And obviously it did really happen, but I was totally out of control of it.
"I couldn’t stop myself from being madly in love with Phillip Schofield."
The first series of the show begins at 8.20pm on Saturday 14th March on ITV
