One of my guilty-pleasure viewings back in 2016 was Young Welsh and Pretty Skint, yet another reality show following in the footsteps of 'The Call Centre' but this time featuring 20 somethings from Cardiff who, despite only working in relatively low paid jobs, liked to spend large on fake tan, hair extensions and nights out,
Two of the people featured in said show were Corey and Marc, best friends and mutual wing-men on nights out. These two were gym obsessed, spent a fortune on male-beauty products, and lived for their weekends.
They were nice enough lads, pretty standard Cardiff-fare, hence their selection for the show I imagine - plenty of people would have been able to relate to them.
I don't know whether it was the show itself or whether they'd had the idea beforehand, but somewhere along the line they got it into their heads that they could be the next Ant and Dec, and one of the episodes featured them having hired an agent and getting their first photoshoot to try and drum-up some publicity for their new celebrity selves....
This was particularly painful viewing - they both looked completely ill-at-ease and out of their depth, one of them especially was just plain awkward, and besides, and it was pretty clear they were never going to make it, at least not as the next 'Ant and Dec'.
But celebrity is unpredictable, and so five years on I got to wondering what happened to them, you never know, they may have made something of themselves after all, so I tried to track them down....
So what happened to Corey and Marc?
It's sad...
The only reference I could find to either of them online was their appearance in an MTV show called 'Just Tattoo of Us' back in 2017, one year after Young, Welsh and Pretty Skint...
And yes, it's as bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping-bad as it sounds - two friends have to trust each other to choose a tattoo for the other, and then have themselves inked without seeing said tattoo first.
And Marc decided to get Corey a tattoo of Donald Trump's face on his arse.....
The only upside of this is relative - apparently they got away lightly compared to other couples - there were far worse tattoo outcomes featured on other episodes of the show.
And then.... nothing!
Besides that 2017 appearance, four years ago now, I couldn't find any kind of social media presence for either of them - which is VERY UNUSUAL for young (or at least young-ish by now) welsh male socialites.
Despite one obviously abandoned Facebook profile, I couldn't find anything on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TiK Tok, and I'm fairly sure they're not on Hive.
Of course they may voluntarily have put all their accounts into super-private mode, but I just can't imagine either of them doing this, not when they're super-social and angling to be seen to pick up (let's face it) D-list celebrity scraps of work.
Surely these two would WANT to be as visible as possible, and even if they've given up on fame it's still unusual for just ordinary people who like their nights out as these two do to have no social media presence at all.
I think it's more likely that they got trolled to fuck somewhere along the line - whether before or after 'Just Tattoo of Us' I don't know - it's the most likely thing that explains their total disappearance from the social media space.
I feel a bit sorry for them, it seems that their shot at stardom has totally backfired and possibly resulted in them having to offline.
And I guess they've been on a five year journey.... from 'Young Welsh and Pretty Skint' D-list stardom to just plain not so young, but still Welsh and still probably pretty skint, just in real life with no one giving a toss!
It's a stark reminder of the downsides of trying to break into celebrity.
P.S. DO I win the 'title of the day award'?